Title: Arrowsmith (1925)
Author: Sinclair Lewis
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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 complaining, to forgive her
finally, but to break their engagement and make life resolutely
simple again.

She did not complain.

She ran to him.  "Dear, you're so tired--your eyes look tired.
Have you been working frightfully hard?  I've been so sorry you
couldn't come 'round, this week.  Dear, you mustn't kill yourself.
Think of all the years you have ahead to do splendid things in.
No, don't talk.  I want you to rest.  Mother's gone to the movies.
Sit here.  See, I'll make you so comfy with these pillows.  Just
lean back--go to sleep if you want to--and I'll read you 'The Crock
of Gold.'  You'll love it."

He was determined that he would not love it and, as he probably had
no sense of humor whatever, it is doubtful whether he appreciated
it, but its differentness aroused him.  Though Madeline's voice was
shrill and cornfieldish after Leora's lazy softness, she read so
eagerly that he was sick ashamed of his intention to hurt her.  He
saw that it was she, with her pretenses, who was the child, and the
detached and fearless Leora who was mature, mistress of a real
world.  The reproofs with which he had planned to crush her
vanished.

Suddenly she was beside him, begging, "I've been so lonely for you,
all week!"

So he was a traitor to both women, it was Leora who had intolerably
roused him; it was really Leora whom he was caressing now; but it
was Madeline who took his hunger to herself, and when she
whimpered, "I'm so glad you're glad to be here," he could say
nothing.  He wanted to talk about Leora, to shout about Leora, to
exult in her, his woman.  He dragged out a few sound but
unimpassioned flatteries; he observed that Madeline was a handsome
young woman and a sound English scholar; and while she gaped with
disappointment at his lukewarmness, he got himself away, at ten.
He had finally succeeded very well indeed in feeling like a low
dog.

He hastened to Clif Clawson.

He had told Clif nothing about Leora.  He resented Clif's probable
scoffing.  He thought well of himself for the calmness with which
he came into their room.  Clif was sitting on the small of his
back, shoeless feet upon the study table, reading a Sherlock Holmes
story which rested on the powerful volume of Osler's Medicine which
he considered himself to be reading.

"Clif!  Want a drink.  Tired.  Let's sneak down to Barney's and see
if we can rustle one."

"Thou speakest as one having tongues and who putteth the speed
behind the ole rhombencephalon comprising the cerebellum and the
medulla oblongata."

"Oh, cut out the Cuteness!  I'm in a bad temper."

"Ah, the laddie has been having a scrap with his chaste lil
Madeline!  Was she horrid to ickly Martykins?  All right.  I'll
quit.  Come on.  Yoicks for the drink."

He told three new stories about Professor Robertshaw, all of them
scurrilous and most of them untrue, on their way, and he almost
coaxed Martin into cheerfulness.  "Barney's" was a poolroom, a
tobacco shop and, since Mohalis was dry by local option, an
admirable blind-pig.  Clif and the hairy-handed Barney greeted each
other in a high and worthy manner:

"The benisons of eventide to you, Barney.  May your circulation
proceed unchecked and particularly the dorsal carpal branch of the
ulnar artery, in which connection, comrade, Prof. Dr. Col. Egbert
Arrowsmith and I would fain trifle with another bottle of that
renowned strawberry pop."

"Gosh, Clif, you cer'nly got a swell line of jaw-music.  If I ever
need a' arm amputated when you get to be a doc, I'll come around
and let you talk it off.  Strawberry pop, gents?"

The front room of Barney's was an impressionistic painting in which
a pool-table, piles of cigarettes, chocolate bars, playing cards,
and pink sporting papers were jumbled in chaos.  The back room was
simpler: cases of sweet and thinly flavored soda, a large ice-box,
and two small tables with broken chairs.  Barney poured, from a
bottle plainly marked Ginger Ale, two glasses of powerful and
appalling raw whiskey, and Clif and Martin took them to the table
in the corner.  The effect was swift.  Martin's confused sorrows
turned to optimism.  He told Clif that he was going to write a book
exposing idealism, but what he meant was that he was going to do
something clever about his dual engagement.  He had it!  He would
invite Leora and Madeline to lunch together, tell them the truth,
and see which of them loved him.  He whooped, and had another
whiskey; he told Clif that he was a fine fellow, and Barney that he
was a public benefactor, and unsteadily he retired to the
telephone, which was shut off from public hearing in a closet.

At the Zenith General Hospital he got the night superintendent, and
the night Superintendent was a man frosty and suspicious.  "This is
no time to be calling up a probationer!  Half-past eleven!  Who are
you, anyway?"

Martin checked the "I'll damn' soon tell you who I am!" which was
his natural reaction, and explained that he was speaking for
Leora's invalid grand-aunt, that the poor old lady was very low,
and if the night superintendent cared to take upon himself the
murder of a blameless gentlewoman--

When Leora came to the telephone he said quickly, and soberly now,
feeling as though he had come from the menace of thronging
strangers into the security of her presence:

"Leora?  Sandy.  Meet me Grand lobby tomorrow, twelve-thirty.
Must!  Important!  Fix 't somehow--your aunt's sick."

"All right, dear.  G' night," was all she said.

It took him long minutes to get an answer from Madeline's flat,
then Mrs. Fox's voice sounded, sleepily, quaveringly:

"Yes, yes?"

"'S Martin."

"Who is it?  Who is it?  What is it?  Are you calling the Fox
apartment?"

"Yes, yes!  Mrs. Fox, it's Martin Arrowsmith speaking."

"Oh, oh, my dear!  The 'phone woke me out of a sound sleep, and I
couldn't make out what you were saying.  I was so frightened.  I
thought maybe it was a telegram or something.  I thought perhaps
something had happened to Maddy's brother.  What is it, dear?  Oh,
I do hope nothing's happened!"

Her confidence in him, the affection of this uprooted old woman
bewildered in a strange land, overcame him; he lost all his whisky-
colored feeling that he was a nimble fellow, and in a melancholy
way, with all the weight of life again upon him, he sighed that no,
nothing had happened, but he'd forgotten to tell Madeline
something--so shor--so sorry call so late--could he speak Mad just
minute--

Then Madeline was bubbling, "Why, Marty dear, what is it?  I do
hope nothing has happened!  Why, dear, you just left here--"

"Listen, d-dear.  Forgot to tell you.  There's a--there's a great
friend of mine in Zenith that I want you to meet--"

"Who is he?"

"You'll see tomorrow.  Listen, I want you come in and meet--come
meet um at lunch.  Going," with ponderous jocularity, "going to
blow you all to a swell feed at the Grand--"

"Oh, how nice!"

"--so I want you to meet me at the eleven-forty interurban, at
College Square.  Can you?"

Vaguely, "Oh, I'd love to but--I have an eleven o'clock, and I
don't like to cut it, and I promised May Harmon to go shopping with
her--she's looking for some kind of shoes that you can wear with
her pink crepe de chine but that you can walk in--and we sort of
thought maybe we might lunch at Ye Kollege Karavanserai--and I'd
half planned to go to the movies with her or somebody, Mother says
that new Alaska film is simply dandy, she saw it tonight, and I
thought I might go see it before they take it off, though Heaven
knows I ought to come right home and study and not go anywhere at
all--"

"Now LISTEN!  It's important.  Don't you trust me?  Will you come
or not?"

"Why, of course I trust you, dear.  All right, I'll try to be
there.  The eleven-forty?"

"Yes."

"At College Square?  Or at Bluthman's Book Shop?"

"AT COLLEGE SQUARE!"

Her gentle "I trust you" and her wambling "I'll try to" were
warring in his ears as he plunged out of the suffocating cell and
returned to Clif.

"What's the grief?" Clif wondered.  "Wife passed away?  Or did the
Giants win in the ninth?  Barney, our wandering-boy-tonight looks
like a necropsy.  Slip him another strawberry pop, quick.  Say,
Doctor, I think you better call a physician."

"Oh, shut up," was all Martin had to say, and that without
conviction.  Before telephoning he had been full of little
brightnesses; he had praised Clif's pool-playing and called Barney
"old Cimex lectularius"; but now, while the affectionate Clif
worked on him, he sat brooding save when he grumbled (with a return
of self-satisfaction), "If you knew all the troubles I have--all
the doggone mess a fellow can get into--YOU'D feel down in the
mouth!"

Clif was alarmed.  "Look here, old socks.  If you've gotten in
debt, I'll raise the cash, somehow.  If it's--  Been going a little
too far with Madeline?"

"You make me sick!  You've got a dirty mind.  I'm not worthy to
touch Madeline's hand.  I regard her with nothing but respect."

"The hell you do!  But never mind, if you say so.  Gosh, wish there
was SOMETHING I could do for you.  Oh!  Have 'nother shot!  Barney!
Come a-runnin'!"

By several drinks Martin was warmed into a hazy carelessness, and
Clif solicitously dragged him home after he had desired to fight
three large academic sophomores.  But in the morning he awoke with
a crackling skull and a realization that he was going to face Leora
and Madeline at lunch.



V


His half-hour journey with Madeline into Zenith seemed a visible
and oppressing thing, like a tornado cloud.  He had not merely to
get through each minute as it came; the whole grim thirty minutes
were present at the same time.  While he was practicing the tactful
observation he was going to present two minutes from now, he could
still hear the clumsy thing he had said two minutes before.  He
fought to keep her attention from the "great friend of his" whom
they were to meet.  With fatuous beaming he described a night at
Barney's; without any success whatever he tried to be funny; and
when Madeline lectured him on the evils of liquor and the evils of
association with immoral persons, he was for once relieved.  But he
could not sidetrack her.

"Who is this man we're going to see?  What are you so mysterious
about?  Oh, Martin, is it a joke?  Aren't we going to meet anybody?
Did you just want to run away from Mama for a while and we have a
bat at the Grand together?  Oh, what fun!  I've always wanted to
lunch at the Grand.  Of course I do think it's too sort of rococo,
but still, it is impressive, and--  Did I guess it, darling?"

"No, there's someone--  Oh, we're going to meet somebody, all
right!"

"Then why don't you tell me who he is?  Honestly, Mart, you make me
impatient."

"Well, I'll tell you.  It isn't a Him; it's a Her."

"Oh!"

"It's--  You know my work takes me to the hospitals, and some of
the nurses at Zenith General have been awfully helpful."  He was
panting.  His eyes ached.  Since the torture of the coming lunch
was inevitable, he wondered why he should go on trying to resist
his punishment.  "Especially there's one nurse there who's a
wonder.  She's learned so much about the care of the sick, and she
puts me onto a lot of good stunts, and she seems like a nice girl--
Miss Tozer, her name is--I think her first name is Lee or something
like that--and she's so--her father is one of the big men in North
Dakota--awfully rich--big banker--I guess she just took up nursing
to do her share in the world's work."  He had achieved Madeline's
own tone of poetic uplift.  "I thought you two might like to know
each other.  You remember you were saying how few girls there are
in Mohalis that really appreciate--appreciate ideals."

"Ye-es."  Madeline gazed at something far away and, whatever it
was, she did not like it.  "I shall be ver' pleased to meet her, of
course.  ANY friend of yours--  Oh, Mart!  I do hope you don't
flirt; I hope you don't get too friendly with all these nurses.  I
don't know anything about it, of course, but I keep hearing how
some of these nurses are regular man-hunters."

"Well, let me tell you right now, Leora isn't!"

"No, I'm sure, but--  Oh, Martykins, you won't be silly and let
these nurses just amuse themselves with you?  I mean, for your own
sake.  They have such an advantage.  Poor Madeline, she wouldn't be
allowed to go hanging around men's rooms learning--things, and you
think you're so psychological, Mart, but honestly, any smart woman
can twist you around her finger."

"Well, I guess I can take care of myself!"

"Oh, I mean--I don't mean--  But I do hope this Tozer person--  I'm
sure I shall like her, if you do, but--  I am your own true love,
aren't I, always!"

She, the proper, ignored the passengers as she clasped his hand.
She sounded so frightened that his anger at her reflections on
Leora turned into misery.  Incidentally, her thumb was gouging
painfully into the back of his hand.  He tried to look tender as he
protested, "Sure--sure--gosh, honest, Mad, look out.  The old
duffer across the aisle is staring at us."

For whatever infidelities he might ever commit he was adequately
punished before they had reached the Grand Hotel.

The Grand was, in 1907, the best hotel in Zenith.  It was compared
by traveling salesmen to the Parker House, the Palmer House, the
West Hotel.  It has been humbled since by the supercilious modesty
of the vast Hotel Thornleigh; dirty now is its tessellated floor
and all the wild gilt tarnished, and in its ponderous leather
chairs are torn seams and stogie ashes and horse-dealers.  But in
its day it was the proudest inn between Chicago and Pittsburgh; an
oriental palace, the entrance a score of brick Moorish arches, the
lobby towering from a black and white marble floor, up past gilt
iron balconies, to the green, pink, pearl, and amber skylight seven
stories above.

They found Leora in the lobby, tiny on an enormous couch built
round a pillar.  She stared at Madeline, quiet, waiting.  Martin
perceived that Leora was unusually sloppy--his own word.  It did
not matter to him how clumsily her honey-colored hair was tucked
under her black hat, a characterless little mushroom of a hat, but
he did see and resent the contrast between her shirtwaist, with the
third button missing, her checked skirt, her unfortunate bright
brown bolero jacket, and Madeline's sleekness of blue serge.  The
resentment was not toward Leora.  Scanning them together (not
haughtily, as the choosing and lofty male, but anxiously) he was
more irritated than ever by Madeline.  That she should be better
dressed was an affront.  His affection flew to guard Leora, to wrap
and protect her.

And all the while he was bumbling:

"--thought you two girls ought to know each other--Miss Fox, want
t' make you 'quainted with Miss Tozer--little celebration--lucky
dog have two Queens of Sheba--"

And to himself, "Oh, hell!"

While they murmured nothing in particular to each other he herded
them into the famous dining-room of the Grand.  It was full of gilt
chandeliers, red plush chairs, heavy silverware, and aged Negro
retainers with gold and green waistcoats.  Round the walls ran
select views of Pompeii, Venice, Lake Como, and Versailles.

"Swell room!" chirped Leora.

Madeline had looked as though she intended to say the same thing in
longer words, but she considered the frescoes all over again and
explained, "Well, it's very large--"

He was ordering, with agony.  He had appropriated four dollars for
the orgy, strictly including the tip, and his standard of good food
was that he must spend every cent of the four dollars.  While he
wondered what "Puree St. Germain" could be, and the waiter
hideously stood watching behind his shoulder, Madeline fell to.
She chanted with horrifying politeness:

"Mr. Arrowsmith tells me you are a nurse, Miss--Tozer."

"Yes, sort of."

"Do you find it interesting?"

"Well--yes--yes, I think it's interesting."

"I suppose it must be wonderful to relieve suffering.  Of course my
work--I'm taking my Doctor of Philosophy degree in English--"  She
made it sound as though she were taking her earldom--"it's rather
dry and detached.  I have to master the growth of the language and
so on and so forth.  With your practical training, I suppose you'd
find that rather stupid."

"Yes, it must be--no, it must be very interesting."

"Do you come from Zenith, Miss--Tozer?"

"No, I come from--  Just a little town.  Well, hardly a town. . . .
North Dakota."

"Oh!  North Dakota!"

"Yes. . . .  Way West."

"Oh, yes. . . .  Are you staying East for some time?"  It was
precisely what a much-resented New York cousin had once said to
Madeline.

"Well, I don't--  Yes, I guess I may be here quite some time."

"Do you, uh, do you find you like it here?"

"Oh, yes, it's pretty nice.  These big cities--  So much to see."

"'Big'?  Well, I suppose it all depends on the point of view,
DOESN'T it?  I always think of New York as big but--  Of course--
Do you find the contrast to North Dakota interesting?"

"Well, of course it's different."

"Tell me what North Dakota's like.  I've always wondered about
these Western states."  It was Madeline's second plagiarism of her
cousin.  "What is the general impression it makes on you?"

"I don't think I know just how you mean."

"I mean what is the general effect?  The--IMPRESSION."

"Well, it's got lots of wheat and lots of Swedes."

"But I mean--  I suppose you're all terribly virile and energetic,
compared with us Easterners."

"I don't--  Well, yes, maybe."

"Have you met lots of people in Zenith?"

"Not so AWFULLY many."

"Oh, have you met Dr. Birchall, that operates in your hospital?
He's such a nice man, and not just a good surgeon but frightfully
talented.  He sings won-derfully, and he comes from the most
frightfully nice family."

"No, I don't think I've met him yet," Leora bleated.

"Oh, you must.  And he plays the slickest--the most gorgeous game
of tennis.  He always goes to all these millionaire parties on
Royal Ridge.  Frightfully smart."

Martin now first interrupted.  "Smart?  Him?  He hasn't got any
brains whatever."

"My dear child, I didn't mean 'smart' in that sense!"  He sat alone
and helpless while she again turned on Leora and ever more brightly
inquired whether Leora knew this son of a corporation lawyer and
that famous debutante, this hatshop and that club.  She spoke
familiarly of what were known as the Leaders of Zenith Society, the
personages who appeared daily in the society columns of the
Advocate-Times, the Cowxes and Van Antrims and Dodsworths.  Martin
was astonished by the familiarity; he remembered that she had once
gone to a charity ball in Zenith but he had not known that she was
so intimate with the peerage.  Certainly Leora had appallingly
never heard of these great ones, nor even attended the concerts,
the lectures, the recitals at which Madeline apparently spent all
her glittering evenings.

Madeline shrugged a little, then, "Well--  Of course with the
fascinating doctors and everybody that you meet in the hospital, I
suppose you'd find lectures frightfully tame.  Well--"  She
dismissed Leora and looked patronizingly at Martin.  "Are you
planning some more work on the what-is-it with rabbits?"

He was grim.  He could do it now, if he got it over quickly.
"Madeline!  Brought you two together because--  Don't know whether
you cotton to each other or not, but I wish you could, because
I've--  I'm not making any excuses for myself.  I couldn't help it.
I'm engaged to both of you, and I want to know--"

Madeline had sprung up.  She had never looked quite so proud and
fine.  She stared at them, and walked away, wordless.  She came
back, she touched Leora's shoulder, and quietly kissed her.  "Dear,
I'm sorry for you.  You've got a job!  You poor baby!"  She strode
away, her shoulders straight.

Hunched, frightened, Martin could not look at Leora.

He felt her hand on his.  He looked up.  She was smiling, easy, a
little mocking.  "Sandy, I warn you that I'm never going to give
you up.  I suppose you're as bad as She says; I suppose I'm
foolish--I'm a hussy.  But you're mine!  I warn you it isn't a bit
of use your getting engaged to somebody else again.  I'd tear her
eyes out!  Now don't think so well of yourself!  I guess you're
pretty selfish.  But I don't care.  You're mine!"

He said brokenly many things beautiful in their commonness.

She pondered, "I do feel we're nearer together than you and Her.
Perhaps you like me better because you can bully me--because I tag
after you and She never would.  And I know your work is more
important to you than I am, maybe more important than you are.  But
I am stupid and ordinary and She isn't.  I simply admire you
frightfully (Heaven knows why, but I do), while She has sense
enough to make you admire Her and tag after Her."

"No!  I swear it isn't because I can bully you, Leora--I swear it
isn't--I don't think it is.  Dearest, don't DON'T think she's
brighter than you are.  She's glib but--  Oh, let's stop talking!
I've found you!  My life's begun!"




Chapter 7



The difference between Martin's relations to Madeline and to Leora
was the difference between a rousing duel and a serene comradeship.
From their first evening, Leora and he depended on each other's
loyalty and liking, and certain things in his existence were
settled forever.  Yet his absorption in her was not stagnant.  He
was always making discoveries about the observations of life which
she kept incubating in her secret little head while she made smoke
rings with her cigarettes and smiled silently.  He longed for the
girl Leora; she stirred him, and with gay frank passion she
answered him; but to another, sexless Leora he talked more honestly
than to Gottlieb or his own worried self, while with her boyish nod
or an occasional word she encouraged him to confidence in his
evolving ambition and disdains.



II


Digamma Pi fraternity was giving a dance.  It was understood among
the anxiously whispering medics that so cosmopolitan was the
University of Winnemac becoming that they were expected to wear the
symbols of respectability known as "dress-suits."  On the solitary
and nervous occasion when Martin had worn evening clothes he had
rented them from the Varsity Pantorium, but he must own them, now
that he was going to introduce Leora to the world as his pride and
flowering.  Like two little old people, absorbed in each other and
diffidently exploring new, unwelcoming streets of the city where
their alienated children live, Martin and Leora edged into the
garnished magnificence of Benson, Hanley and Koch's, the loftiest
department store in Zenith.  She was intimidated by the luminous
cases of mahogany and plate glass, by the opera hats and lustrous
mufflers and creamy riding breeches.  When he had tried on a dinner
suit and come out for her approval, his long brown tie and soft-
collared shirt somewhat rustic behind the low evening waistcoat,
and when the clerk had gone to fetch collars, she wailed:

"Darn it, Sandy, you're too grand for me.  I just simply can't get
myself to fuss over my clothes, and here you're going to go and
look so spiffy I won't have a chance with you."

He almost kissed her.

The clerk, returning, warbled, "I think, Modom, you'll find that
your husband will look vurry nice indeed in these wing collars."

Then, while the clerk sought ties, he did kiss her, and she sighed:

"Oh, gee, you're one of these people that get ahead.  I never
thought I'd have to live up to a man with a dress-suit and a come-
to-Heaven collar.  Oh, well, I'll tag!"



III


For the Digamma Ball, the University Armory was extremely
decorated.  The brick walls were dizzy with bunting, spotty with
paper chrysanthemums and plaster skulls and wooden scalpels ten
feet long.

In six years at Mohalis, Martin had gone to less than a score of
dances, though the refined titillations of communal embracing were
the chief delight of the co-educational university.  When he
arrived at the Armory, with Leora timorously brave in a blue crepe
de chine made in no recognized style, he did not care whether he
had a single two-step, though he did achingly desire to have the
men crowd in and ask Leora, admire her and make her welcome.  Yet
he was too proud to introduce her about, lest he seem to be begging
his friends to dance with her.  They stood alone, under the
balcony, disconsolately facing the vastness of the floor, while
beyond them flashed the current of dancers, beautiful, formidable,
desirable.  Leora and he had assured each other that, for a student
affair, dinner jacket and black waistcoat would be the thing, as
stated in the Benson, Hanley and Koch Chart of Correct Gents'
Wearing Apparel, but he grew miserable at the sight of voluptuous
white waistcoats, and when that embryo famous surgeon, Angus Duer,
came by, disdainful as a greyhound and pushing on white gloves
(which are the whitest, the most superciliously white objects on
earth), then Martin felt himself a hobbledehoy.

"Come on, WE'LL dance," he said, as though it were a defiance to
all Angus Duers.

He very much wanted to go home.

He did not enjoy the dance, though she waltzed easily and himself
not too badly.  He did not even enjoy having her in his arms.  He
could not believe that she was in his arms.  As they revolved he
saw Duer join a brilliance of pretty girls and distinguished-
looking women about the great Dr. Silva, dean of the medical
school.  Angus seemed appallingly at home, and he waltzed off with
the prettiest girl, sliding, swinging, deft.  Martin tried to hate
him as a fool, but he remembered that yesterday Angus had been
elected to the honorary society of Sigma Xi.

Leora and he crept back to the exact spot beneath the balcony where
they had stood before, to their den, their one safe refuge.  While
he tried to be nonchalant and talk up to his new clothes, he was
cursing the men he saw go by laughing with girls, ignoring his
Leora.

"Not many here yet," he fussed.  "Pretty soon they'll all be
coming, and then you'll have lots of dances."

"Oh, I don't mind."

("God, won't somebody come and ask the poor kid?")

He fretted over his lack of popularity among the dancing-men of the
medical school.  He wished Clif Clawson were present--Clif liked
any sort of assembly, but he could not afford dress-clothes.  Then,
rejoicing as at sight of the best-beloved, he saw Irving Watters,
that paragon of professional normality, wandering toward them, but
Watters passed by, merely nodding.  Thrice Martin hoped and
desponded, and now all his pride was gone.  If Leora could be
happy--

"I wouldn't care a hoot if she fell for the gabbiest fusser in the
whole U., and gave me the go-by all evening.  Anything to let her
have a good time!  If I could coax Duer over--  No, that's one
thing I couldn't stand: crawling to that dirty snob--  I will!"

Up ambled Fatty Pfaff, just arrived.  Martin pounced on him
lovingly.  "H'lo, old Fat!  You a stag tonight?  Meet my friend
Miss Tozer."

Fatty's bulbous eyes showed approval of Leora's cheeks and amber
hair.  He heaved, "Pleasedmeetch--dance starting--have the honor?"
in so flattering a manner that Martin could have kissed him.

That he himself stood alone through the dance did not occur to him.
He leaned against a pillar and gloated.  He felt gorgeously
unselfish. . . .  That various girl wallflowers were sitting near
him, waiting to be asked, did not occur to him either.

He saw Fatty introduce Leora to a decorative pair of Digams, one of
whom begged her for the next.  Thereafter she had more invitations
than she could take.  Martin's excitement cooled.  It seemed to him
that she clung too closely to her partners, that she followed their
steps too eagerly.  After the fifth dance he was agitated.
"Course!  SHE'S enjoying herself!  Hasn't got time to notice that I
just stand here--yes, by thunder, and hold her scarf!  Sure!  Fine
for her.  Fact I might like a little dancing myself--  And the way
she grins and gawps at that fool Brindle Morgan, the--the--the
damnedest--  Oh, you and I are going to have a talk, young woman!
And those hounds trying to pinch her off me--the one thing I've
ever loved!  Just because they dance better than I can, and spiel a
lot of foolishness--  And that damn' orchestra playing that damn'
peppery music--  And she falling for all their damn' cheap
compliments and--  You and I are going to have one lovely little
understanding!"

When she next returned to him, besieged by three capering medics,
he muttered to her, "Oh, it doesn't MATTER about ME!"

"Would you like this one?  COURSE you shall have it!"  She turned
to him fully; she had none of Madeline's sense of having to act for
the benefit of observers.  Through a strained eternity of waiting,
while he glowered, she babbled of the floor, the size of the room,
and her "dandy partners."  At the sound of the music he held out
his arms.

"No," she said.  "I want to talk to you."  She led him to a corner
and hurled at him, "Sandy, this is the last time I'm going to stand
for your looking jealous.  Oh, I know!  See here!  If we're going
to stick together--and we are!--I'm going to dance with just as
many men as I want to, and I'm going to be just as foolish with 'em
as I want to.  Dinners and those things--I suppose I'll always go
on being a clam.  Nothing to say.  But I love dancing, and I'm
going to do exactly what I want to, and if you had any sense
whatever, you'd know I don't care a hang for anybody but you.
Yours!  Absolute.  No matter what fool things you do--and they'll
probably be a plenty.  So when you go and get jealous on me again,
you sneak off and get rid of it.  Aren't you ashamed of yourself!"

"I wasn't jealous--  Yes, I was.  Oh, I can't help it!  I love you
so much.  I'd be one fine lover, now wouldn't I, if I never got
jealous!"

"All right.  Only you've got to keep it under cover.  Now we'll
finish the dance."

He was her slave.



IV


It was regarded as immoral, at the University of Winnemac, to dance
after midnight, and at that hour the guests crowded into the
Imperial Cafeteria.  Ordinarily it closed at eight, but tonight it
kept open till one, and developed a spirit of almost lascivious
mirth.  Fatty Pfaff did a jig, another humorous student, with a
napkin over his arm, pretended to be a waiter, and a girl (but she
was much disapproved) smoked a cigarette.

At the door Clif Clawson was waiting for Martin and Leora.  He was
in his familiar shiny gray suit, with a blue flannel shirt.

Clif assumed that he was the authority to whom all of Martin's
friends must be brought for judgment.  He had not met Leora.
Martin had confessed his double engagement; he had explained that
Leora was unquestionably the most gracious young woman on earth;
but as he had previously used up all of his laudatory adjectives
and all of Clif's patience on the subject of Madeline, Clif failed
to listen, and prepared to dislike Leora as another siren of
morality.

He eyed her now with patronizing enmity.  He croaked at Martin
behind her back, "Good-looking kid, I will say that for her--what's
wrong with her?"  When they had brought their own sandwiches and
coffee and mosaic cake from the long counter, Clif rasped:

"Well, it's grand of a couple of dress-suit swells like you to
assassinate with me 'mid the midmosts of sartorials and Sassiety.
Gosh, it's fierce I had to miss the select pleasures of an evening
with Anxious Duer and associated highboys, and merely play a low
game of poker--in which Father deftly removed the sum of six
simolea, point ten, from the fore-gathered bums and yahoos.  Well,
Leory, I suppose you and Martykins here have now ratiocinated all
these questions of polo and, uh, Monte Carlo and so on."

She had an immense power of accepting people as they were.  While
Clif waited, leering, she placidly investigated the inside of a
chicken sandwich and assented, "Um-huh."

"Good boy!  I thought you were going to pull that 'If you are a
roughneck, I don't see why you think you've got to boast about it'
stuff that Mart springs on me!"

Clif turned into a jovial and (for him) unusually quiet
companion. . . .  Ex-farmhand, ex-book-agent, ex-mechanic, he had
so little money yet so scratching a desire to be resplendent that
he took refuge in pride in poverty, pride in being offensive.  Now,
when Leora seemed to look through his boasting, he liked her as
quickly as had Martin, and they buzzed with gaiety.  Martin was
warmed to benevolence toward mankind, including Angus Duer, who was
at the end of the room at a table with Dean Silva and his silvery
women.  Without plan, Martin sprang up, raced down the room.
Holding out his hand he clamored:

"Angus, old man, want to congratulate you on getting Sigma Xi.
That's fine."

Duer regarded the outstretched hand as though it was an instrument
which he had seen before but whose use he could not quite remember.
He picked it up and shook it tentatively.  He did not turn his
back; he was worse than rude--he looked patient.

"Well, good luck," said Martin, chilled and shaky.

"Very good of you.  Thanks."

Martin returned to Leora and Clif, to tell them the incident as a
cosmic tragedy.  They agreed that Angus Duer was to be shot.  In
the midst of it Duer came past, trailing after Dean Silva's party,
and nodded to Martin, who glared back, feeling noble and mature.

At parting, Clif held Leora's hand and urged, "Honey, I think a lot
of Mart, and one time I was afraid the old kid was going to get
tied up to--to parties that would turn him into a hand-shaker.  I'm
a hand-shaker myself.  I know less about medicine than Prof
Robertshaw.  But this boob has some conscience to him, and I'm so
darn' glad he's playing around with a girl that's real folks and--
Oh, listen at me fallin' all over my clumsy feet!  But I just mean
I hope you won't mind Uncle Clif saying he does by golly like you a
lot!"

It was almost four when Martin returned from taking Leora home and
sagged into bed.  He could not sleep.  The aloofness of Angus Duer
racked him as an insult to himself, as somehow an implied insult to
Leora, but his boyish rage had passed into a bleaker worry.  Didn't
Duer, for all his snobbishness and shallowness, have something that
he himself lacked?  Didn't Clif, with his puppy-dog humor, his
speech of a vaudeville farmer, his suspicion of fine manners as
posing, take life too easily?  Didn't Duer know how to control and
drive his hard little mind?  Wasn't there a technique of manners as
there was of experimentation. . . .  Gottlieb's fluent bench-
technique versus the clumsy and podgy hands of Ira Hinkley. . . .
Or was all this inquiry a treachery, a yielding to Duer's own
affected standard?

He was so tired that behind his closed eyelids were flashes of
fire.  His whirling mind flew over every sentence he had said or
heard that night, till round his twisting body there was fevered
shouting.



V


As he grumped across the medical campus next day, he came
unexpectedly upon Angus and he was smitten with the guiltiness and
embarrassment one has toward a person who has borrowed money and
probably will not return it.  Mechanically he began to blurt
"Hello," but he checked it in a croak, scowled, and stumbled on.

"Oh, Mart," Angus called.  He was dismayingly even.  "Remember
speaking to me last evening?  It struck me when I was going out
that you looked huffy.  I was wondering if you thought I'd been
rude.  I'm sorry if you did.  Fact is, I had a rotten headache.
Look.  I've got four tickets for 'As It Listeth,' in Zenith, next
Friday evening--original New York cast!  Like to see it?  And I
noticed you were with a peach, at the dance.  Suppose she might
like to go along with us, she and some friend of hers?"

"Why--gosh--I'll 'phone her--darn' nice of you to ask us--"

It was not till melancholy dusk, when Leora had accepted and
promised to bring with her a probationer-nurse named Nelly Byers,
that Martin began to brood:

"Wonder if he did have a headache last night?

"Wonder if somebody GAVE him the tickets?

"Why didn't he ask Dad Silva's daughter to go with us?  Does he
think Leora is some tart I've picked up?

"Sure, he never really quarrels with anybody--wants to keep us all
friendly, so we'll send him surgical patients some day when we're
hick G. P.'s and he's a Great and Only.

"Why did I crawl down so meekly?

"I don't care!  If Leora enjoys it--  Me personally, I don't care
two hoots for all this trotting around--  Though of course it isn't
so bad to see pretty women in fine clothes, and be dressed as good
as anybody--  Oh, I don't KNOW!"



VI


In the slightly Midwestern city of Zenith, the appearance of a play
"with the original New York cast" was an event.  (What Play it was
did not much matter.)  The Dodsworth Theatre was splendid with the
aristocracy from the big houses on Royal Ridge.  Leora and Nelly
Byers admired the bloods--graduates of Yale and Harvard and
Princeton, lawyers and bankers, motor-manufacturers and inheritors
of real estate, virtuosi of golf, familiars of New York--who with
their shrill and glistening women occupied the front rows.  Miss
Byers pointed out the Dodsworths, who were often mentioned in Town
Topics.

Leora and Miss Byers bounced with admiration of the hero when he
refused the governorship; Martin worried because the heroine was
prettier than Leora; and Angus Duer (who gave an appearance of
knowing all about plays without having seen more than half a dozen
in his life) admitted that the set depicting "Jack Vanduzen's Camp
in the Adirondacks: Sunset, the Next Day" was really very nice.

Martin was in a mood of determined hospitality.  He was going to
give them supper and that was all there was to it.  Miss Byers
explained that they had to be in the hospital by a quarter after
eleven, but Leora said lazily, "Oh, I don't care.  I'll slip in
through a window.  If you're there in the morning, the Old Cat
can't prove you got in late."  Shaking her head at this lying
wickedness, Miss Byers fled to a trolley car, while Leora, Angus,
and Martin strolled to Epstein's Alt Nuremberg Cafe for beer and
Swiss cheese sandwiches flavored by the sight of German drinking
mottos and papier-mache armor.

Angus was studying Leora, looking from her to Martin, watching
their glances of affection.  That a keen young man should make a
comrade of a girl who could not bring him social advancement, that
such a thing as the boy and girl passion between Martin and Leora
could exist, was probably inconceivable to him.  He decided that
she was conveniently frail.  He gave Martin a refined version of a
leer, and set himself to acquiring her for his own uses.

"I hope you enjoyed the play," he condescended to her.

"Oh, yes--"

"Jove, I envy you two.  Of course I understand why girls fall for
Martin here, with his romantic eyes, but a grind like me, I have to
go on working without a single person to give me sympathy.  Oh,
well, I deserve it for being shy of women."

With unexpected defiance from Leora:  "When anybody says that, it
means they're not shy, and they despise women."

"Despise them?  Why, child, honestly, I long to be a Don Juan.  But
I don't know how.  Won't you give me a lesson?"  Angus's aridly
correct voice had become lulling; he concentrated on Leora as he
would have concentrated on dissecting a guinea pig.  She smiled at
Martin now and then to say, "Don't be jealous, idiot.  I'm
magnificently uninterested in this conceited hypnotist."  But she
was flustered by Angus's sleek assurance, by his homage to her eyes
and wit and reticence.

Martin twitched with jealousy.  He blurted that they must be going--
Leora really had to be back--  The trolleys ran infrequently after
midnight and they walked to the hospital through hollow and
sounding streets.  Angus and Leora kept up a high-strung chatter,
while Martin stalked beside them, silent, sulky, proud of being
sulky.  Skittering through a garage alley they came out on the mass
of Zenith General Hospital, a block long, five stories of bleak
windows with infrequent dim blotches of light.  No one was about.
The first floor was but five feet from the ground, and they lifted
Leora up to the limestone ledge of a half-open corridor window.
She slid in, whispering, "G' night!  Thanks!"

Martin felt empty, dissatisfied.  The night was full of a chill
mournfulness.  A light was suddenly flickering in a window above
them, and there was a woman's scream breaking down into moans.  He
felt the tragedy of parting--that in the briefness of life he
should lose one moment of her living presence.

"I'm going in after her; see she gets there safe," he said.

The frigid edge of the stone sill bit his hands, but he vaulted,
thrust up his knee, crawled hastily through the window.  Ahead of
him, in the cork-floored hallway lit only by a tiny electric globe,
Leora was tiptoeing toward a flight of stairs.  He ran after her,
on his toes.  She squeaked as he caught her arm.

"We got to say good night better than that!" he grumbled.  "With
that damn' Duer--"

"Ssssssh!  They'd simply murder me if they caught you here.  Do you
want to get me fired?"

"Would you care, if it was because of me?"

"Yes--no--well--  BUT they'd probably fire you from medic school,
my lad.  If--"  His caressing hands could feel her shiver with
anxiety.  She peered along the corridor, and his quickened
imagination created sneaking forms, eyes peering from doorways.
She sighed, then, resolutely:  "We can't talk here.  We'll slip up
to my room--roommate's away for the week.  Stand there, in the
shadow.  If nobody's in sight upstairs, I'll come back."

He followed her to the floor above, to a white door, then
breathlessly inside.  As he closed the door he was touched by this
cramped refuge, with its camp-beds and photographs from home and
softly wrinkled linen.  He clasped her, but with hand against his
chest she forbade him, as she mourned:

"You were jealous again!  How can you distrust me so?  With that
fool!  Women not like him?  They wouldn't have a chance!  Likes
himself too well.  And then you jealous!"

"I wasn't--  Yes, I was, but I don't dare!  To have to sit there
and grin like a hyena, with him between us, when I wanted to talk
to you, to kiss you!  All right!  Probably I'll always be jealous.
It's you that have got to trust me.  I'm not easy-going; never will
be.  Oh, trust me--"

Their profound and unresisted kiss was the more blind in memory of
that barren hour with Angus.  They forgot that the superintendent
of nurses might dreadfully come bursting in; they forgot that Angus
was waiting.  "Oh, curse Angus--let him go home!" was Martin's only
reflection, as his eyes closed and his long loneliness vanished.

"Good night, dear love--my love forever," he exulted.

In the still ghostliness of the hall, he laughed as he thought of
how irritably Angus must have marched away.  But from the window he
discovered Angus huddled on the stone steps, asleep.  As he touched
the ground, he whistled, but stopped short.  He saw bursting from
the shadow a bulky man, vaguely in a porter's uniform, who was
shouting:

"I've caught yuh!  Back you come into the hospital, and we'll find
out what you've been up to!"

They closed.  Martin was wiry, but in the watchman's clasp he was
smothered.  There was a reek of dirty overalls, of unbathed flesh.
Martin kicked his shins, struck at his boulder of red cheek, tried
to twist his arm.  He broke loose, started to flee, and halted.
The struggle, in its contrast to the aching sweetness of Leora, had
infuriated him.  He faced the watchman, raging.

From the awakened Angus, suddenly appearing beside him, there was a
thin sound of disgust.  "Oh, come ON!  Let's get out of this.  Why
do you dirty your hands on scum like him?"

The watchman bellowed, "Oh, I'm scum, am I?  I'll show you!"

He collared Angus and slapped him.

Under the sleepy street-lamp, Martin saw a man go mad.  It was not
the unfeeling Angus Duer who stared at the watchman; it was a
killer, and his eyes were the terrible eyes of the killer, speaking
to the least experienced a message of death.  He gasped only, "He
dared to touch me!"  A pen-knife was somehow in his hands, he had
leaped at the watchman, and he was busily and earnestly endeavoring
to cut his throat.

As Martin tried to hold them he heard the agitated pounding of a
policeman's night stick on the pavement.  Martin was slim but he
had pitched hay and strung telephone wire.  He hit the watchman,
judiciously, beside the left ear, snatched Angus's wrist, and
dragged him away.  They ran up an alley, across a courtyard.  They
came to a thoroughfare as an owl trolley glowed and rattled round
the corner; they ran beside it, swung up on the steps, and were
safe.

Angus stood on the back platform, sobbing.  "My God, I wish I'd
killed him!  He laid his filthy hands on me!  Martin!  Hold me here
on the car.  I thought I'd got over that.  Once when I was a kid I
tried to kill a fellow--  God, I wish I'd cut that filthy swine's
throat!"

As the trolley came into the center of the city, Martin coaxed,
"There's an all-night lunch up Oberlin Avenue where we can get some
white mule.  Come on.  It'll straighten you up."

Angus was shaky and stumbling--Angus the punctilious.  Martin led
him into the lunch-room where, between catsup bottles, they had raw
whisky in granite-like coffee cups.  Angus leaned his head on his
arm and sobbed, careless of stares, till he had drunk himself into
obliteration, and Martin steered him home.  Then to Martin, in his
furnished room with Clif snoring, the evening became incredible and
nothing more incredible than Angus Duer.  "Well, he'll be a good
friend of mine now, for always.  Fine!"

Next morning, in the hall of the Anatomy Building, he saw Angus and
rushed toward him.  Angus snapped; "You were frightfully stewed
last night, Arrowsmith.  If you can't handle your liquor better
than that, you better cut it out entirely."

He walked on, clear-eyed, unruffled.




Chapter 8



And always Martin's work went on--assisting Max Gottlieb,
instructing bacteriological students, attending lectures and
hospital demonstrations--sixteen merciless hours to the day.  He
stole occasional evenings for original research or for peering into
the stirring worlds of French and German bacteriological
publications; he went proudly now and then to Gottlieb's cottage
where, against rain-smeared brown wallpaper, were Blake drawings
and a signed portrait of Koch.  But the rest was nerve-gnawing.

Neurology, O.B., internal medicine, physical diagnosis; always a
few pages more than he could drudge through before he fell asleep
at his rickety study-table.

Memorizing of gynecology, of ophthalmology, till his mind was burnt
raw.

Droning afternoons of hospital demonstrations, among stumbling
students barked at by tired clinical professors.

The competitive exactions of surgery on dogs, in which Angus Duer
lorded it with impatient perfection.

Martin admired the professor of internal medicine, T. J. H. Silva,
known as "Dad" Silva, who was also dean of the medical faculty.  He
was a round little man with a little crescent of mustache.  Silva's
god was Sir William Osler, his religion was the art of sympathetic
healing, and his patriotism was accurate physical diagnosis.  He
was a Doc Vickerson of Elk Mills, grown wiser and soberer and more
sure.  But Martin's reverence for Dean Silva was counterbalanced by
his detestation for Dr. Roscoe Geake, professor of otolaryngology.

Roscoe Geake was a peddler.  He would have done well with oil
stock.  As an otolaryngologist he believed that tonsils had been
placed in the human organism for the purpose of providing
specialists with closed motors.  A physician who left the tonsils
in any patient was, he felt, foully and ignorantly overlooking his
future health and comfort--the physician's future health and
comfort.  His earnest feeling regarding the nasal septum was that
it never hurt any patient to have part of it removed, and if the
most hopeful examination could find nothing the matter with the
patient's nose and throat except that he was smoking too much,
still, in any case, the enforced rest after an operation was good
for him.  Geake denounced this cant about Letting Nature Alone.
Why, the average well-to-do man appreciated attention!  He really
didn't think much of his specialists unless he was operated on now
and then--just a little and not very painfully.  Geake had one
classic annual address in which, winging far above otolaryngology,
he evaluated all medicine, and explained to grateful healers like
Irving Watters the method of getting suitable fees:

"Knowledge is the greatest thing in the medical world but it's no
good whatever unless you can sell it, and to do this you must first
impress your personality on the people who have the dollars.
Whether a patient is a new or an old friend, you must always use
SALESMANSHIP on him.  Explain to him, also to his stricken and
anxious family, the hard work and thought you are giving to his
case, and so make him feel that the good you have done him, or
intend to do him, is even greater than the fee you plan to charge.
Then, when he gets your bill, he will not misunderstand or kick."



II


There was, as yet, no vision in Martin of serene spaciousness of
the mind.  Beyond doubt he was a bustling young man, and rather
shrill.  He had no uplifted moments when he saw himself in relation
to the whole world--if indeed he realized that there was a deal of
the world besides himself.  His friend Clif was boorish, his
beloved Leora was rustic, however gallant she might be, and he
himself wasted energy in hectic busyness and in astonishment at
dullness.  But if he had not ripened, yet he was close to earth, he
did hate pretentiousness, he did use his hands, and he did seek
iron actualities with a curiosity inextinguishable.

And at infrequent times he perceived the comedy of life; relaxed
for a gorgeous hour from the intensity wearing to his admirers.
Such was the hour before Christmas vacation when Roscoe Geake rose
to glory.

It was announced in the Winnemac Daily News that Dr. Geake had been
called from the chair of otolaryngology to the vice-presidency of
the puissant New Idea Medical Instrument and Furniture Company of
Jersey City.  In celebration he gave a final address to the entire
medical school on "The Art and Science of Furnishing the Doctor's
Office."

He was a neatly finished person, Geake, eye-glassed and
enthusiastic and fond of people.  He beamed on his loving students
and cried:

"Gentlemen, the trouble with too many doctors, even those splendid
old pioneer war-horses who through mud and storm, through winter's
chill blast and August's untempered heat, go bringing cheer and
surcease from pain to the world's humblest, yet even these old
Nestors not so infrequently settle down in a rut and never shake
themselves loose.  Now that I am leaving this field where I have
labored so long and happily, I want to ask every man jack of you to
read, before you begin to practice medicine, not merely your
Rosenau and Howell and Gray, but also, as a preparation for being
that which all good citizens must be, namely, practical men, a most
valuable little manual of modern psychology, 'How to Put Pep in
Salesmanship,' by Grosvenor A. Bibby.  For don't forget, gentlemen,
and this is my last message to you, the man worth while is not
merely the man who takes things with a smile but also the man who's
trained in philosophy, PRACTICAL philosophy, so that instead of
day-dreaming and spending all his time talking about 'ethics,'
splendid though they are, and 'charity,' glorious virtue though
that be, yet he never forgets that unfortunately the world judges a
man by the amount of good hard cash he can lay away.  The graduates
of the University of Hard Knocks judge a physician as they judge a
business man, not merely by his alleged 'high ideals' but by the
horsepower he puts into carrying them out--and making them pay!
And from a scientific standpoint, don't overlook the fact that the
impression of properly remunerated competence which you make on a
patient is of just as much importance, in these days of the new
psychology, as the drugs you get into him or the operations he lets
you get away with.  The minute he begins to see that other folks
appreciate and reward your skill, that minute he must begin to feel
your power and so to get well.

"Nothing is more important in inspiring him than to have such an
office that as soon as he steps into it, you have begun to sell him
the idea of being properly cured.  I don't care whether a doctor
has studied in Germany, Munich, Baltimore, and Rochester.  I don't
care whether he has all science at his fingertips, whether he can
instantly diagnose with a considerable degree of accuracy the most
obscure ailment, whether he has the surgical technique of a Mayo, a
Crile, a Blake, an Ochsner, a Cushing.  If he has a dirty old
office, with hand-me-down chairs and a lot of second-hand
magazines, then the patient isn't going to have confidence in him;
he is going to resist the treatment--and the doctor is going to
have difficulty in putting over and collecting an adequate fee.

"To go far below the surface of this matter into the fundamental
philosophy and esthetics of office-furnishing for the doctor, there
are today two warring schools, the Tapestry School and the Aseptic
School, if I may venture to so denominate and conveniently
distinguish them.  Both of them have their merits.  The Tapestry
School claims that luxurious chairs for waiting patients, handsome
hand-painted pictures, a bookcase jammed with the world's best
literature in expensively bound sets, together with cut-glass vases
and potted palms, produce an impression of that opulence which can
come only from sheer ability and knowledge.  The Aseptic School, on
the other hand, maintains that what the patient wants is that
appearance of scrupulous hygiene which can be produced only by
furnishing the outer waiting-room as well as the inner offices in
white-painted chairs and tables, with merely a Japanese print
against a gray wall.

"But, gentlemen, it seems obvious to me, so obvious that I wonder
it has not been brought out before, that the ideal reception-room
is a combination of these two schools!  Have your potted palms and
handsome pictures--to the practical physician they are as necessary
a part of his working equipment as a sterilizer or a Baumanometer.
But so far as possible have everything in sanitary-looking white--
and think of the color-schemes you can evolve, or the good wife for
you, if she be one blessed with artistic tastes!  Rich golden or
red cushions, in a Morris chair enameled the purest white!  A
floor-covering of white enamel, with just a border of delicate
rose!  Recent and unspotted numbers of expensive magazines, with
art covers, lying on a white table!  Gentlemen, there is the idea
of imaginative salesmanship which I wish to leave with you; there
is the gospel which I hope to spread in my fresh field of endeavor,
the New Idea Instrument Company of Jersey City, where at any time I
shall be glad to see and shake by the hand any and all of you."



III


Through the storm of his Christmas examinations, Martin had an
intensified need of Leora.  She had been summoned home to Dakota,
perhaps for months, on the ground that her mother was unwell, and
he had, or thought he had, to see her daily.  He must have slept
less than four hours a night.  Grinding at examinations on the
interurban car, he dashed in to her, looking up to scowl when he
thought of the lively interns and the men patients whom she met in
the hospital, scorning himself for being so primitive, and worrying
all over again.  To see her at all, he had to wait for hours in the
lobby, or walk up and down in the snow outside till she could slip
to a window and peep out.  When they were together, they were
completely absorbed.  She had a genius for frank passion; she
teased him, tantalized him, but she was tender and unafraid.

He was sick lonely when he saw her off at the Union Station.  His
examination papers were competent but, save in bacteriology and
internal medicine, they were sketchy.  He turned emptily to the
laboratory for vacation time.

He had so far displayed more emotion than achievement in his tiny
original researches.  Gottlieb was patient.  "It iss a fine system,
this education.  All what we cram into the students, not Koch and
two dieners could learn.  Do not worry about the research.  We
shall do it yet."  But he expected Martin to perform a miracle or
two in the whole fortnight of the holidays and Martin had no
stomach with which to think.  He played in the laboratory; he spent
his time polishing glassware, and when he transplanted cultures
from his rabbits, his notes were incomplete.

Gottlieb was instantly grim.  "Was gibt es dann?  Do you call these
notes?  Always when I praise a man must he stop working?  Do you
think that you are a Theobald Smith or a Novy that you should sit
and meditate?  You have the ability of Pfaff!"

For once, Martin was impenitent.  He mumbled to himself, as
Gottlieb stamped out like a Grand Duke, "Rats, I've got SOME rest
coming to me.  Gosh, most fellows, why, they go to swell homes for
vacation, and have dances and fathers and everything.  If Leora was
here, we'd go to a show tonight."

He viciously seized his cap (a soggy and doubtful object), sought
Clif Clawson, who was spending the vacation in sleeping between
poker games at Barney's, and outlined a project of going into town
and getting drunk.  It was executed so successfully that during
vacation it was repeated whenever he thought of the coming torture-
wheel of uninspiring work, whenever he realized that it was only
Gottlieb and Leora who held him here.  After vacation, in late
January, he found that whisky relieved him from the frenzy of work,
from the terror of loneliness--then betrayed him and left him the
more weary, the more lonely.  He felt suddenly old; he was twenty-
four now, he reminded himself, and a schoolboy, his real work not
even begun.  Clif was his refuge; Clif admired Leora and would
listen to his babbling of her.

But Clif and Martin came to the misfortune of Founder's Day.



IV


January thirtieth, the birthday of the late Dr. Warburton Stonedge,
founder of the medical department of Winnemac, was annually
celebrated by a banquet rich in fraternalism and speeches and large
lack of wine.  All the faculty reserved their soundest observations
for the event, and all the students were expected to be present.

This year it was held in the large hall of the University Y.M.C.A.,
a moral apartment with red wall paper, portraits of whiskered
alumni who had gone out to be missionaries, and long thin pine
boxes intended to resemble exposed oak beams.  About the famous
guests--Dr. Rouncefield the Chicago surgeon, a diabetes specialist
from Omaha, a Pittsburgh internist--stood massed the faculty
members.  They tried to look festal, but they were worn and nervous
after four months of school.  They had wrinkles and tired eyes.
They were all in business suits, mostly unpressed.  They sounded
scientific and interested; they used words like phlebarteriectasia
and hepatocholangio-enterostomy, and they asked the guests, "So you
just been in Rochester?  What's, uh, what're Charley and Will doing
in orthopedics?"  But they were full of hunger and melancholy.  It
was half-past seven, and they who did not normally dine at seven,
dined at six-thirty.

Upon this seedy gaiety entered a splendor, a tremendous black-
bearded personage, magnificent of glacial shirt-bosom, vast of
brow, wild-eyed with genius or with madness.  In a marvelous great
voice, with a flavor of German accent, he inquired for Dr. Silva,
and sailed into the dean's group like a frigate among fishing-
smacks.

"Who the dickens is that?" wondered Martin.

"Let's edge in and find out," said Clif, and they clung to the
fast increasing knot about Dean Silva and the mystery, who was
introduced as Dr. Benoni Carr, the pharmacologist.

They heard Dr. Carr, to the pale admiration of the school-bound
assistant professors, boom genially of working with Schmiedeberg in
Germany on the isolation of dihydroxypentamethylendiamin, of the
possibilities of chemotherapy, of the immediate cure of sleeping
sickness, of the era of scientific healing.  "Though I am American-
born, I have the advantage of speaking German from a child, and so
perhaps I can better understand the work of my dear friend Ehrlich.
I saw him receive a decoration from His Imperial Highness the
Kaiser.  Dear old Ehrlich, he was like a child!"

There was at this time (but it changed curiously in 1914 and 1915)
an active Germanophile section of the faculty.  They bent before
this tornado of erudition.  Angus Duer forgot that he was Angus
Duer; and Martin listened with excited stimulation.  Benoni Carr
had all of Gottlieb's individuality, all his scorn of machine-made
teachers, all his air of a great world which showed Mohalis as
provincial, with none of Gottlieb's nervous touchiness.  Martin
wished Gottlieb were present; he wondered whether the two giants
would clash.

Dr. Carr was placed at the speakers' table, near the dean.  Martin
was astonished to see the eminent pharmacologist, after a shocked
inspection of the sour chicken and mishandled salad which made up
most of the dinner, pour something into his water glass from a huge
silver flask--and pour that something frequently.  He became
boisterous.  He leaned across two men to slap the indignant dean on
the shoulder; he contradicted his neighbors; he sang a stanza of
"I'm Bound Away for the Wild Missourai."

Few phenomena at the dinner were so closely observed by the
students as the manners of Dr. Benoni Carr.

After an hour of strained festivity, when Dean Silva had risen to
announce the speakers, Carr lumbered to his feet and shouted,
"Let's not have any speeches.  Only fools make speeches.  Wise men
sing songs.  Whoopee!  Oh, tireolee, oh, tireolee, oh, tireolee a
lady!  You profs are the bunk!"

Dean Silva was to be seen beseeching him, then leading him out of
the room, with the assistance of two professors and a football
tackle, and in the hush of a joyful horror Clif grunted to Martin:

"Here's where I get mine!  And the damn' fool promised to stay
sober!"

"Huh?"

"I might of known he'd show up stewed and spill the beans.  Oh,
maybe the dean won't hand me hell proper!"

He explained.  Dr. Benoni Carr was born Benno Karkowski.  He had
graduated from a medical school which gave degrees in two years.
He had read vastly, but he had never been in Europe.  He had been
"spieler" in medicine shows, chiropodist, spiritualist medium,
esoteric teacher, head of sanitariums for the diversion of neurotic
women.  Clif had encountered him in Zenith, when they were both
drunk.  It was Clif who had told Dean Silva that the celebrated
pharmacologist, just back from Europe, was in Zenith for a few days
and perhaps might accept an invitation--

The dean had thanked Clif ardently.

The banquet ended early, and there was inadequate attention to Dr.
Rouncefield's valuable address on the Sterilization of Catgut.

Clif sat up worrying, and admitting the truth of Martin's several
observations.  Next day--he had a way with women when he deigned to
take the trouble--he pumped the dean's girl secretary, and
discovered his fate.  There had been a meeting of a faculty
committee; the blame for the Benoni Carr outrage had been placed on
Clif; and the dean had said all the things Clif had imagined, with
a number which he had not possessed the talent to conceive.  But
the dean was not going to summon him at once; he was going to keep
him waiting in torture, then execute him in public.

"Good-by, old M.D. degree!  Rats, I never thought much of the
doctor business.  Guess I'll be a bond salesman," said Clif to
Martin.  He strolled away, he went to the dean, and remarked:

"Oh, Dean Silva, I just dropped in to tell you I've decided to
resign from the medic school.  Been offered a big job in, uh, in
Chicago, and I don't think much of the way you run the school,
anyway.  Too much memorizing and too little real spirit of science.
Good luck, Doc.  So long."

"Gggggg--" said Dean Silva.

Clif moved into Zenith, and Martin was left alone.  He gave up the
double room at the front of his boarding-house for a hall-room at
the rear, and in that narrow den he sat and mourned in a desolation
of loneliness.  He looked out on a vacant lot in which a tattered
advertisement of pork and beans flapped on a leaning billboard.  He
saw Leora's eyes and heard Clif's comfortable scoffing, and the
quiet was such as he could not endure.




Chapter 9



The persistent yammer of a motor horn drew Martin to the window of
the laboratory, a late afternoon in February.  He looked down on a
startling roadster, all streamlines and cream paint, with enormous
headlights.  He slowly made out that the driver, a young man in
coffee-colored loose motor coat and hectic checked cap and intense
neckwear, was Clif Clawson, and that Clif was beckoning.

He hastened down, and Clif cried:

"Oh, boy!  How do you like the boat?  Do you diagnose this suit?
Scotch heather--honest!  Uncle Clif has nabbed off a twenty-five-
buck-a-week job WITH commissions, selling autos.  Boy, I was lost
in your old medic school.  I can sell anything to anybody.  In a
year I'll be making eighty a week.  Jump in, old son.  I'm going to
take you in to the Grand and blow you to the handsomest feed you
ever stuffed into your skinny organism."

The thirty-eight miles an hour at which Clif drove into Zenith was,
in 1908, dismaying speed.  Martin discovered a new Clif.  He was as
noisy as ever, but more sure, glowing with schemes for immediately
acquiring large sums of money.  His hair, once bushy and greasy in
front, tending to stick out jaggedly behind, was sleek now, and his
face had the pinkness of massage.  He stopped at the fabulous Grand
Hotel with a jar of brakes; before he left the car he changed his
violent yellow driving-gauntlets for a pair of gray gloves with
black stitching, which he immediately removed as he paraded through
the lobby.  He called the coat-girl "Sweetie," and at the dining-
room door he addressed the head-waiter:

"Ah, Gus, how's the boy, how's the boy feeling tonight?  How's the
mucho famoso majordomoso?  Gus, want to make you 'quainted with Dr.
Arrowsmith.  Any time the doc comes here I want you to shake a leg
and hand him out that well-known service, my boy, and give him
anything he wants, and if he's broke, you charge it to me.  Now,
Gus, I want a nice little table for two, with garage and hot and
cold water, and wouldst fain have thy advice, Gustavus, on the
oysters and hore duffers and all the ingredients fair of a Maecenan
feast."

"Yes, sir, right this way, Mr. Clawson," breathed the headwaiter.

Clif whispered to Martin, "I've got him like that in two weeks!
You watch my smoke!"

While Clif was ordering, a man stopped beside their table.  He
resembled an earnest traveling-man who liked to get back to his
suburban bungalow every Saturday evening.  He was beginning to grow
slightly bald, slightly plump.  His rimless eyeglasses, in the
midst of a round smooth face, made him seem innocent.  He stared
about as though he wished he had someone with whom to dine.  Clif
darted up, patted the man's elbow, and bawled:

"Ah, there, Babski, old boy.  Feeding with anybody?  Come join the
Sporting Gents' Association."

"All right, be glad to.  Wife's out of town," said the man.

"Shake hands with Dr. Arrowsmith Mart, meet George F. Babbitt, the
hoch-gecelebrated Zenith real-estate king.  Mr. Babbitt has just
adorned his thirty-fourth birthday by buying his first benzine
buggy from yours truly and beg to remain as always."

It was, at least on the part of Clif and Mr. Babbitt, a mirthful
affair, and when Martin had joined them in cocktails, St. Louis
beer, and highballs, he saw that Clif was the most generous person
now living, and Mr. George F. Babbitt a companion of charm.

Clif explained how certain he was--apparently his distinguished
medical training had something to do with it--to be president of a
motor factory, and Mr. Babbitt confided:

"You fellows are a lot younger than I am, eight-ten years, and you
haven't learned yet, like I have, that where the big pleasure is,
is in Ideals and Service and a Public Career.  Now just between you
and me and the gatepost, my vogue doesn't lie in real estate but in
oratory.  Fact, one time I planned to study law and go right in for
politics.  Just between ourselves, and I don't want this to go any
farther, I've been making some pretty good affiliations lately--
been meeting some of the rising young Republican politicians.  Of
course a fellow has got to start in modestly, but I may say, sotto
voce, that I expect to run for alderman next fall.  It's
practically only a step from that to mayor and then to governor of
the state, and if I find the career suits me, there's no reason why
in ten or twelve years, say in 1918 or 1920, I shouldn't have the
honor of representing the great state of Winnemac in Washington, D.
C.!"

In the presence of a Napoleon like Clif and a Gladstone like George
F. Babbitt, Martin perceived his own lack of power and business
skill, and when he had returned to Mohalis he was restless.  Of his
poverty he had rarely thought, but now, in contrast to Clif's rich
ease, his own shabby clothes and his pinched room seemed shameful.



II


A long letter from Leora, hinting that she might not be able to
return to Zenith, left him the more lonely.  Nothing seemed worth
doing.  In that listless state he was mooning about the laboratory
during elementary bacteriology demonstration hour, when Gottlieb
sent him to the basement to bring up six male rabbits for
inoculation.  Gottlieb was working eighteen hours a day on new
experiments; he was jumpy and testy; he gave orders like insults.
When Martin came dreamily back with six females instead of males,
Gottlieb shrieked at him, "You are the worst fool that was ever in
this lab!"

The groundlings, second-year men who were not unmindful of Martin's
own scoldings, tittered like small animals, and jarred him into
raging, "Well, I couldn't make out what you said.  And it's the
first time I ever fell down.  I won't stand your talking to me like
that!"

"You will stand anything I say!  Clumsy!  You can take your hat and
get out!"

"You mean I'm fired as assistant?"

"I am glad you haf enough intelligence to understand that, no
matter how wretched I talk!"

Martin flung away.  Gottlieb suddenly looked bewildered and took a
step toward Martin's retreating back.  But the class, the small
giggling animals, they stood delighted, hoping for more, and
Gottlieb shrugged, glared them into terror, sent the least awkward
of them for the rabbits, and went on, curiously quiet.

And Martin, at Barney's dive, was hotly drinking the first of the
whiskys which sent him wandering all night, by himself.  With each
drink he admitted that he had an excellent chance to become a
drunkard, and with each he boasted that he did not care.  Had Leora
been nearer than Wheatsylvania twelve hundred miles away, he would
have fled to her for salvation.  He was still shaky next morning,
and he had already taken a drink to make it possible to live
through the morning when he received the note from Dean Silva
bidding him report to the office at once.

The dean lectured:

"Arrowsmith, you've been discussed a good deal by the faculty
council of late.  Except in one or two courses--in my own I have no
fault to find--you have been very inattentive.  Your marks have
been all right, but you could do still better.  Recently you have
also been drinking.  You have been seen in places of very low
repute, and you have been intimate with a man who took it upon
himself to insult me, the Founder, our guests, and the University.
Various faculty members have complained of your superior attitude--
making fun of our courses right out in class!  But Dr. Gottlieb has
always warmly defended you.  He insisted that you have a real flair
for investigative science.  Last night, however, he admitted that
you had recently been impertinent to him.  Now unless you
immediately turn over a new leaf, young man, I shall have to
suspend you for the rest of the year and, if that doesn't do the
work, I shall have to ask for your resignation.  And I think it
might be a good thing for your humility--you seem to have the pride
of the devil, young man!--it might be a good idea for you to see
Dr. Gottlieb and start off your reformation by apologizing--"

It was the whisky spoke, not Martin:

"I'm damned if I will!  He can go to the devil!  I've given him my
life, and then he tattles on me--"

"That's absolutely unfair to Dr. Gottlieb.  He merely--"

"Sure.  He merely let me down.  I'll see him in hell before I'll
apologize, after the way I've worked for him.  And as for Clif
Clawson that you were hinting at--him 'take it on himself to insult
anybody'?  He just played a joke, and you went after his scalp.
I'm glad he did it!"

Then Martin waited for the words that would end his scientific
life.

The little man, the rosy, pudgy, good little man, he stared and
hummed and spoke softly:

"Arrowsmith, I could fire you right now, of course, but I believe
you have good stuff in you.  I decline to let you go.  Naturally,
you're suspended, at least till you come to your senses and
apologize to me and to Gottlieb."  He was fatherly; almost he made
Martin repent; but he concluded, "And as for Clawson, his 'joke'
regarding this Benoni Carr person--and why I never looked the
fellow up is beyond me, I suppose I was too busy--his 'joke,' as
you call it, was the action either of an idiot or a blackguard, and
until you are able to perceive that fact, I don't think you will be
ready to come back to us."

"All right," said Martin, and left the room.

He was very sorry for himself.  The real tragedy, he felt, was that
though Gottlieb had betrayed him and ended his career, ended the
possibility of his mastering science and of marrying Leora, he
still worshiped the man.

He said good-by to no one in Mohalis save his landlady.  He packed,
and it was a simple packing.  He stuffed his books, his notes, a
shabby suit, his inadequate linen, and his one glory, the dinner
clothes, into his unwieldy imitation-leather bag.  He remembered
with drunken tears the hour of buying the dinner jacket.

Martin's money, from his father's tiny estate, came in bimonthly
checks from the bank at Elk Mills.  He had now but six dollars.

In Zenith he left his bag at the interurban trolley station and
sought Clif, whom he found practicing eloquence over a beautiful
pearl-gray motor hearse, in which a beer-fed undertaker was
jovially interested.  He waited, sitting hunched and twisted on the
steel running-board of a limousine.  He resented but he was too
listless to resent greatly the stares of the other salesmen and the
girl stenographers.

Clif dashed up, bumbling, "Well, well, how's the boy?  Come out and
catchum little drink."

"I could use one."

Martin knew that Clif was staring at him.  As they entered the bar
of the Grand Hotel, with its paintings of lovely but absent-minded
ladies, its mirrors, its thick marble rail along a mahogany bar, he
blurted:

"Well, I got mine, too.  Dad Silva's fired me, for general
footlessness.  I'm going to bum around a little and then get some
kind of a job.  God, but I'm tired and nervous!  Say, can you lend
me some money?"

"You bet.  All I've got.  How much you want?"

"Guess I'll need a hundred dollars.  May drift around quite some
time."

"Golly, I haven't got that much, but prob'ly I can raise it at the
office.  Here, sit down at this table and wait for me."

How Clif obtained the hundred dollars has never been explained, but
he was back with it in a quarter-hour.  They went on to dinner, and
Martin had much too much whisky.  Clif took him to his own
boarding-house--which was decidedly less promissory of prosperity
than Clif's clothes--firmly gave him a cold bath to bring him to,
and put him to bed.  Next morning he offered to find a job for him,
but Martin refused and left Zenith by the northbound train at noon.

Always, in America, there remains from pioneer days a cheerful
pariahdom of shabby young men who prowl causelessly from state to
state, from gang to gang, in the power of the Wanderlust.  They
wear black sateen shirts, and carry bundles.  They are not
permanently tramps.  They have home towns to which they return, to
work quietly in the factory or the section-gang for a year--for a
week--and as quietly to disappear again.  They crowd the smoking
cars at night; they sit silent on benches in filthy stations; they
know all the land yet of it they know nothing, because in a hundred
cities they see only the employment agencies, the all-night
lunches, the blind-pigs, the scabrous lodging-houses.  Into that
world of voyageurs Martin vanished.  Drinking steadily, only half-
conscious of whither he was going, of what he desired to do,
shamefully haunted by Leora and Clif and the swift hands of
Gottlieb, he flitted from Zenith to the city of Sparta, across to
Ohio, up into Michigan, west to Illinois.  His mind was a shambles.
He could never quite remember, afterward, where he had been.  Once,
it is clear, he was soda-fountain clerk in a Minnemagantic drug-
store.  Once he must have been, for a week, dishwasher in the
stench of a cheap restaurant.  He wandered by freight trains, on
blind baggages, on foot.  To his fellow prospectors he was known as
"Slim," the worst-tempered and most restless of all their company.

After a time a sense of direction began to appear in his crazy
drifting.  He was instinctively headed westward, and to the west,
toward the long prairie dusk, Leora was waiting.  For a day or two
he stopped drinking.  He woke up feeling not like the sickly hobo
called "Slim," but like Martin Arrowsmith, and he pondered, with
his mind running clear, "Why shouldn't I go back?  Maybe this
hasn't been so bad for me.  I was working too hard.  I was pretty
high-strung.  Blew up.  Like to, uh--  Wonder what happened to my
rabbits? . . .  Will they ever let me do research again?"

But to return to the University before he had seen Leora was
impossible.  His need of her was an obsession, making the rest of
earth absurd and worthless.  He had, with blurry cunning, saved
most of the hundred dollars he had taken from Clif; he had lived--
very badly, on grease--swimming stews and soda-reeking bread--by
what he earned along the way.  Suddenly, on no particular day, in
no particular town in Wisconsin, he stalked to the station, bought
a ticket to Wheatsylvania, North Dakota, and telegraphed to Leora,
"Coming 2:43 tomorrow Wednesday Sandy."



III


He crossed the wide Mississippi into Minnesota.  He changed trains
at St. Paul; he rolled into gusty vastnesses of snow, cut by thin
lines of fence-wire.  He felt free, in release from the little
fields of Winnemac and Ohio, in relaxation from the shaky nerves of
midnight study and midnight booziness.  He remembered his days of
wire-stringing in Montana and regained that careless peace.  Sunset
was a surf of crimson, and by night, when he stepped from the
choking railroad coach and tramped the platform at Sauk Centre, he
drank the icy air and looked up to the vast and solitary winter
stars.  The fan of the Northern Lights frightened and glorified the
sky.  He returned to the coach with the energy of that courageous
land.  He nodded and gurgled in brief smothering sleep; he sprawled
on the seat and talked with friendly fellow vagrants; he drank
bitter coffee and ate enormously of buckwheat cakes at a station
restaurant; and so, changing at anonymous towns, he came at last to
the squatty shelters, the two wheat-elevators, the cattle-pen, the
oil-tank, and the red box of a station with its slushy platform,
which composed the outskirts of Wheatsylvania.  Against the
station, absurd in a huge coonskin coat, stood Leora.  He must have
looked a little mad as he stared at her from the vestibule, as he
shivered with the wind.  She lifted to him her two open hands,
childish in red mittens.  He ran down, he dropped his awkward bag
on the platform and, unaware of the gaping furry farmers, they were
lost in a kiss.

Years after, in a tropic noon, he remembered the freshness of her
wind-cooled cheeks.

The train was gone, pounding out of the tiny station.  It had stood
like a dark wall beside the platform, protecting them, but now the
light from the snowfields glared in on them and left them exposed
and self-conscious.

"What--what's happened?" she fluttered.  "No letters.  I was so
frightened."

"Off bumming.  The dean suspended me--being fresh to profs.  D' y'
care?"

"Course not, if you wanted to--"

"I've come to marry you."

"I don't see how we can, dearest, but--  All right.  There'll be a
lovely row with Dad."  She laughed.  "He's always so surprised and
HURT when anything happens that he didn't plan out.  It'll be nice
to have you with me in the scrap, because you aren't supposed to
know that he expects to plan out everything for everybody and--
Oh, Sandy, I've been so lonely for you!  Mother isn't really a bit
sick, not the least bit, but they go on keeping me here.  I think
probably somebody hinted to Dad that folks were saying he must be
broke, if his dear little daughter had to go off and learn nursing,
and he hasn't worried it all out yet--it takes Andrew Jackson Tozer
about a year to worry out anything.  Oh, Sandy!  You're here!"

After the clatter and jam of the train, the village seemed blankly
empty.  He could have walked around the borders of Wheatsylvania in
ten minutes.  Probably to Leora one building differed from another--
she appeared to distinguish between the general store of Norblom
and that of Frazier & Lamb--but to Martin the two-story wooden
shacks creeping aimlessly along the wide Main Street were
featureless and inappreciable.  Then "There's our house, end of the
next block," said Leora, as they turned the corner at the feed and
implement store, and in a panic of embarrassment Martin wanted to
halt.  He saw a storm coming: Mr. Tozer denouncing him as a failure
who desired to ruin Leora, Mrs. Tozer weeping.

"Say--say--say--have you told 'em about me?" he stammered.

"Yes.  Sort of.  I said you were a wonder in medic school, and
maybe we'd get married when you finished your internship, and then
when your wire came, they wanted to know why you were coming, and
why it was you wired from Wisconsin, and what color necktie you had
on when you were sending the wire, and I couldn't make 'em
understand I didn't know.  They discussed it.  Quite a lot.  They
do discuss things.  All through supper.  Solemn.  Oh, Sandy, do
curse and swear some at meals."

He was in a funk.  Her parents, formerly amusing figures in a
story, became oppressively real in sight of the wide, brown, porchy
house.  A large plate-glass window with a colored border had
recently been cut through the wall, as a sign of prosperity, and
the garage was new and authoritative.

He tagged after Leora, expecting the blast.  Mrs. Tozer opened the
door, and stared at him plaintively--a thin, faded, unhumorous
woman.  She bowed as though he was not so much unwelcome as
unexplained and doubtful.

"Will you show Mr. Arrowsmith his room, Ory, or shall I?" she
peeped.

It was the kind of house that has a large phonograph but no books,
and if there were any pictures, as beyond hope there must have
been, Martin never remembered them.  The bed in his room was lumpy
but covered with a chaste figured spread, and the flowery pitcher
and bowl rested on a cover embroidered in red with lambs, frogs,
water lilies, and a pious motto.

He took as long as he could in unpacking things which needed no
unpacking, and hesitated down the stairs.  No one was in the
parlor, which smelled of furnace-heat and balsam pillows; then,
from nowhere apparent, Mrs. Tozer was there, worrying about him and
trying to think of something polite to say.

"Did you have a comfortable trip on the train?"

"Oh, yes, it was--  Well, it was pretty crowded."

"Oh, was it crowded?"

"Yes, there were a lot of people traveling."

"Were there?  I suppose--  Yes.  Sometimes I wonder where all the
people can be going that you see going places all the time.  Did
you--was it very cold in the Cities--in Minneapolis and St. Paul?"

"Yes, it was pretty cold."

"Oh, was it cold?"

Mrs. Tozer was so still, so anxiously polite.  He felt like a
burglar taken for a guest, and intensely he wondered where Leora
could be.  She came in serenely, with coffee and a tremendous
Swedish coffee-ring voluptuous with raisins and glistening brown
sugar, and she had them talking, almost easily, about the coldness
of winter and the value of Fords when into the midst of all this
brightness slid Mr. Andrew Jackson Tozer, and they drooped again to
politeness.

Mr. Tozer was as thin and undistinguished and sun-worn as his wife,
and like her he peered, he kept silence and fretted.  He was
astonished by everything in the world that did not bear on his
grain elevator, his creamery, his tiny bank, the United Brethren
Church, and the careful conduct of an Overland car.  It was not
astounding that he should have become almost rich, for he accepted
nothing that was not natural and convenient to Andrew Jackson
Tozer.

He hinted a desire to know whether Martin "drank," how prosperous
he was, and how he could possibly have come all this way from the
urbanities of Winnemac.  (The Tozers were born in Illinois, but
they had been in Dakota since childhood, and they regarded
Wisconsin as the farthest, most perilous rim of the Eastern
horizon.)  They were so blank, so creepily polite, that Martin was
able to avoid such unpleasant subjects as being suspended.  He
dandled an impression that he was an earnest young medic who in no
time at all would be making large and suitable sums of money for
the support of their Leora, but as he was beginning to lean back in
his chair he was betrayed by the appearance of Leora's brother.

Bert Tozer, Albert R. Tozer, cashier and vice-president of the
Wheatsylvania State Bank, auditor and vice-president of the Tozer
Grain and Storage Company, treasurer and vice-president of the Star
Creamery, was not in the least afflicted by the listening
dubiousness of his parents.  Bertie was a very articulate and
modern man of affairs.  He had buck teeth, and on his eye-glasses
was a gold chain leading to a dainty hook behind his left ear.  He
believed in town-boosting, organized motor tours, Boy Scouts,
baseball, and the hanging of I.W.W.'s; and his most dolorous regret
was that Wheatsylvania was too small--as yet--to have a Y.M.C.A.
or a Commercial Club.  Plunging in beside him was his fiancee, Miss
Ada Quist, daughter of the feed and implement store.  Her nose was
sharp, but not so sharp as her voice or the suspiciousness with
which she faced Martin.

"This Arrowswith?" demanded Bert.  "Huh!  Well, guess you're glad
to be out here in God's country!"

"Yes, it's fine--"

"Trouble with the Eastern states is, they haven't got the git, or
the room to grow.  You ought to see a real Dakota harvest!  Look
here, how come you're away from school this time of year?"

"Why--"

"I know all about school-terms.  I went to business college in
Grand Forks.  How come you can get away now?"

"I took a little lay-off."

"Leora says you and her are thinking of getting married."

"We--"

"Got any cash outside your school-money?"

"I have not!"

"Thought so!  How juh expect to support a wife?"

"I suppose I'll be practicing medicine some day."

"Some day!  Then what's the use of talking about being engaged till
you can support a wife?"

"That," interrupted Bert's lady-love, Miss Ada Quist, "that's just
what _I_ said, Ory!"  She seemed to speak with her pointed nose as
much as with her button of a mouth.  "If Bert and I can wait, I
guess other people can!"

Mrs. Tozer whimpered, "Don't be too hard on Mr. Arrowsmith, Bertie.
I'm sure he wants to do the right thing."

"I'm not being hard on anybody!  I'm being sensible.  If Pa and you
would tend to things instead of standing around fussing, I wouldn't
have to butt in.  I don't believe in interfering with anybody
else's doings, or anybody interfering with mine.  Live and let live
and mind your own business is my motto, and that's what I said to
Alec Ingleblad the other day when I was in there having a shave and
he was trying to get funny about our holding so many mortgages, but
I'll be blamed if I'm going to allow a fellow that I don't know
anything about to come snooping around My Sister till I find out
something about his prospects!"

Leora crooned, "Bertie, lamb, your tie is climbing your collar
again."

"Yes and YOU, Ory," shrieked Bert, "if it wasn't for me you'd have
married Sam Petchek, two years ago!"

Bert further said, with instances and illustrations, that she was
light-minded, and as for nursing--  NURSING!

She said that Bert was what he was, and tried to explain to Martin
the matter of Sam Petchek.  (It has never yet been altogether
explained.)

Ada Quist said that Leora did not care if she broke her dear
parents' hearts and ruined Bert's career.

Martin said, "Look here, I--" and never got farther.  Mr. and Mrs.
Tozer said they were all to be calm, and of course Bert didn't
mean--  But really, it was true; they had to be sensible, and how
Mr. Arrowsmith could expect to support a wife--

The conference lasted till nine-thirty, which, as Mr. Tozer pointed
out, was everybody's bedtime, and except for the five-minute
discussion as to whether Miss Ada Quist was to stay to supper, and
the debate on the saltiness of this last cornbeef, they clave
faithfully to the inquiry as to whether Martin and Leora were
engaged.  All persons interested, which apparently did not include
Martin and Leora, decided that they were not.  Bert ushered Martin
upstairs.  He saw to it that the lovers should not have a chance
for a good-night kiss; and until Mr. Tozer called down the hall, at
seven minutes after ten, "You going to stay up and chew the rag the
whole blessed night, Bert?" he made himself agreeable by sitting on
Martin's bed, looking derisively at his shabby baggage, and
demanding the details of his parentage, religion, politics, and
attitude toward the horrors of card-playing and dancing.

At breakfast they all hoped that Martin would stay one more night
in their home--plenty of room.

Bert stated that Martin would come down-town at ten and be shown
the bank, creamery, and wheat elevator.

But at ten Martin and Leora were on the eastbound train.  They got
out at the county seat, Leopolis, a vast city of four thousand
population, with a three-story building.  At one that afternoon
they were married, by the German Lutheran pastor.  His study was a
bareness surrounding a large, rusty wood-stove, and the witnesses,
the pastor's wife and an old German who had been shoveling walks,
sat on the wood-box and looked drowsy.  Not till they had caught
the afternoon train for Wheatsylvania did Martin and Leora escape
from the ghostly apprehension which had hunted them all day.  In
the fetid train, huddled close, hands locked, innocently free of
the alienation which the pomposity of weddings sometimes casts
between lovers, they sighed, "Now what are we going to do--what ARE
we going to do?"

At the Wheatsylvania station they were met by the whole family,
rampant.

Bert had suspected elopement.  He had searched half a dozen towns
by long-distance telephone, and got through to the county clerk
just after the license had been granted.  It did not soften Bert's
mood to have the clerk remark that if Martin and Leora were of age,
there was nothing he could do, and he didn't "care a damn who's
talking--I'm running this Office!"

Bert had come to the station determined to make Martin perfect,
even as Bert Tozer was perfect, and to do it right now.

It was a dreadful evening in the Tozer mansion.

Mr. Tozer said, with length, that Martin had undertaken
responsibilities.

Mrs. Tozer wept, and said that she hoped Ory had not, for certain
reasons, HAD to be married--

Bert said that if such was the case, he'd kill Martin--

Ada Quist said that Ory could now see what came of pride and
boasting about going off to her old Zenith--

Mr. Tozer said that there was one good thing about it, anyway: Ory
could see for herself that they couldn't let her go back to nursing
school and get into more difficulties--

Martin from time to time offered remarks to the effect that he was
a good young man, a wonderful bacteriologist, and able to take care
of HIS wife; but no one save Leora listened.

Bert further propounded (while his father squeaked, "Now don't be
TOO hard on the boy,") that if Martin THOUGHT for one single SECOND
that he was going to get one red CENT out of the Tozers because
he'd gone and butted IN where nobody'd INVITED him, he, Bert,
wanted to KNOW about it, that was all, he certainly wanted to KNOW
about it!

And Leora watched them, turning her little head from one to
another.  Once she came over to press Martin's hand.  In the
roughest of the storm, when Martin was beginning to glare, she drew
from a mysterious pocket a box of very bad cigarettes, and lighted
one.  None of the Tozers had discovered that she smoked.  Whatever
they thought about her sex morals, her infidelity to United
Brethrenism, and her general dementia, they had not suspected that
she could commit such an obscenity as smoking.  They charged on
her, and Martin caught his breath savagely.

During these fulminations Mr. Tozer had somehow made up his mind.
He could at times take the lead away from Bert, whom he considered
useful but slightly indiscreet, and unable to grasp the "full value
of a dollar."  (Mr. Tozer valued it at one dollar and ninety, but
the progressive Bert at scarce more than one-fifty.)  Mr. Tozer
mildly gave orders:

They were to stop "scrapping."  They had no proof that Martin was
necessarily a bad match for Ory.  They would see.  Martin would
return to medical school at once, and be a good boy and get through
as quickly as he could and begin to earn money.  Ory would remain
at home and behave herself--and she certainly would never act like
a Bad Woman again, and smoke cigarettes.  Meantime Martin and she
would have no, uh, relations.  (Mrs. Tozer looked embarrassed, and
the hungrily attentive Ada Quist tried to blush.)  They could write
to each other once a week, but that was all.  They would in no way,
uh, act as though they were married till he gave permission.

"Well?" he demanded.

Doubtless Martin should have defied them and with his bride in his
arms have gone forth into the night.  But it seemed only a moment
to graduation, to beginning his practice.  He had Leora now,
forever.  For her, he must be sensible.  He would return to work,
and be Practical.  Gottlieb's ideals of science?  Laboratories?
Research?  Rot!

"All right," he said.

It did not occur to him that their abstention from love began
tonight; it did not come to him till, holding out his hands to
Leora, smiling with virtue at having determined to be prudent, he
heard Mr. Tozer cackling, "Ory, you go on up to bed now--in your
own room!"

That was his bridal night; tossing in his bed, ten yards from her.

Once he heard a door open, and thrilled to her coming.  He waited,
taut.  She did not come.  He peeped out, determined to find her
room.  His deep feeling about his brother-in-law suddenly
increased.  Bert was parading the hall, on guard.  Had Bert been
more formidable, Martin might have killed him, but he could not
face that buck-toothed and nickering righteousness.  He lay and
resolved to curse them all in the morning and go off with Leora,
but with the coming of the three-o'clock depression he perceived
that with him she would probably starve, that he was disgraced,
that it was not at all certain he would not become a drunkard.

"Poor kid, I'm not going to spoil her life.  God, I do love her!
I'm going back, and the way I'm going to work--  Can I stand this?"

That was his bridal night and the barren dawn.

Three days later he was walking into the office of Dr. Silva, dean
of the Winnemac Medical School.




Chapter 10



Dean Silva's secretary looked up delightedly, she hearkened with
anticipation.  But Martin said meekly, "Please, could I see the
dean?" and meekly he waited, in the row of oak chairs beneath the
Dawson Hunziker pharmaceutical calendar.

When he had gone solemnly through the ground-glass door to the
dean's office, he found Dr. Silva glowering.  Seated, the little
man seemed large, so domed was his head, so full his rounding
mustache.

"Well, sir!"

Martin pleaded, "I'd like to come back, if you'll let me.  Honest,
I do apologize to you, and I'll go to Dr. Gottlieb and apologize--
though honest, I can't lay down on Clif Clawson--"

Dr. Silva bounced up from his chair, bristling.  Martin braced
himself.  Wasn't he welcome?  Had he no home, anywhere?  He could
not fight.  He had no more courage.  He was so tired after the drab
journey, after restraining himself from flaring out at the Tozers.
He was so tired!  He looked wistfully at the dean.

The little man chuckled, "Never mind, boy.  It's all right!  We're
glad you're back.  Bother the apologies!  I just wanted you to do
whatever'd buck you up.  It's good to have you back!  I believed in
you, and then I thought perhaps we'd lost you.  Clumsy old man!"

Martin was sobbing, too weak for restraint, too lonely and too
weak, and Dr. Silva soothed, "Let's just go over everything and
find out where the trouble was.  What can I do?  Understand,
Martin, the thing I want most in life is to help give the world as
many good physicians, great healers, as I can.  What started your
nervousness?  Where have you been?"

When Martin came to Leora and his marriage, Silva purred, "I'm
delighted!  She sounds like a splendid girl.  Well, we must try and
get you into Zenith General for your internship, a year from now,
and make you able to support her properly."

Martin remembered how often, how astringently, Gottlieb had sneered
at "dese merry vedding or jail bells."  He went away Silva's
disciple; he went away to study furiously; and the brilliant
insanity of Max Gottlieb's genius vanished from his faith.



II


Leora wrote that she had been dropped from the school of nursing
for over-absence and for being married.  She suspected that it was
her father who had informed the hospital authorities.  Then, it
appeared, she had secretly sent for a shorthand book and, on
pretense of helping Bert, she was using the typewriter in the bank,
hoping that by next autumn she could join Martin and earn her own
living as a stenographer.

Once he offered to give up medicine, to take what work he could
find and send for her.  She refused.

Though in his service to Leora and to the new god, Dean Silva, he
had become austere, denying himself whisky, learning page on page
of medicine with a frozen fury, he was always in a vacuum of desire
for her, and always he ran the last block to his boarding-house,
looking for a letter from her.  Suddenly he had a plan.  He had
tasted shame--this one last shame would not matter.  He would flee
to her in Easter vacation; he would compel Tozer to support her
while she studied stenography in Zenith; he would have her near him
through the last year.  He paid Clif the borrowed hundred, when the
bi-monthly check came from Elk Mills, and calculated his finances
to the penny.  By not buying the suit he distressingly needed, he
could manage it.  Then for a month and more he had but two meals a
day, and of those meals one was bread and butter and coffee.  He
washed his own linen in the bath-tub and, except for occasional
fiercely delightful yieldings, he did not smoke.

His return to Wheatsylvania was like his first flight, except that
he talked less with fellow tramps, and all the way, between uneasy
naps in the red-plush seats of coaches, he studied the bulky books
of gynecology and internal medicine.  He had written certain
instructions to Leora.  He met her on the edge of Wheatsylvania and
they had a moment's talk, a resolute kiss.

News spreads not slowly in Wheatsylvania.  There is a certain
interest in other people's affairs, and the eyes of citizens of
whose existence Martin did not know had followed him from his
arrival.  When the culprits reached the bone-littered castle of the
Tozer ogres, Leora's father and brother were already there, and
raging.  Old Andrew Jackson cried out upon them.  He said that
conceivably it may not have been insane in Martin to have "run away
from school once, but to go and sneak back this second time was
absolutely plumb crazy."  Through his tirade, Martin and Leora
smiled confidently.

From Bert, "By God, sir, this is too much!"  Bert had been reading
fiction.  "I object to the use of profanity, but when you come and
annoy My Sister a second time, all I can say is, by God, sir, this
is too blame much!"

Martin looked meditatively out of the widow.  He noticed three
people strolling the muddy street.  They all viewed the Tozer house
with hopeful interest.  Then he spoke steadily:

"Mr. Tozer, I've been working hard.  Everything has gone fine.  But
I've decided I don't care to live without my wife.  I've come to
take her back.  Legally, you can't prevent me.  I'll admit, without
any argument, I can't support her yet, if I stay in the University.
She's going to study stenography.  She'll be supporting herself in
a few months, and meanwhile I expect you to be decent enough to
send her money."

"This IS too much," said Tozer, and Bert carried it on:  "Fellow
not only practically ruins a girl but comes and demands that we
support her for him!"

"All right.  Just as you want.  In the long run it'll be better for
her and for me and for you if I finish medic school and have my
profession, but if you won't take care of her, I'll chuck school,
I'll go to work.  Oh, I'll support her, all right!  Only you'll
never see her again.  If you go on being idiots, she and I will
leave here on the night train for the Coast, and that'll be the
end."  For the first time in his centuries of debate with the
Tozers, he was melodramatic.  He shook his fist under Bert's nose.
"And if you try to prevent our going, God help you!  And the way
this town will laugh at you! . . .  How about it, Leora?  Are you
ready to go away with me--forever?"

"Yes," she said.

They discussed it, greatly.  Tozer and Bert struck attitudes of
defense.  They couldn't, they said, be bullied by anybody.  Also,
Martin was an Adventurer, and how did Leora know he wasn't planning
to live on the money they sent her?  In the end they crawled.  They
decided that this new, mature Martin, this new, hard-eyed Leora
were ready to throw away everything for each other.

Mr. Tozer whined a good deal, and promised to send her seventy
dollars a month till she should be prepared for office-work.

At the Wheatsylvania station, looking from the train window, Martin
realized that this anxious-eyed, lip-puckering Andrew Jackson Tozer
did love his daughter, did mourn her going.



III


He found for Leora a room on the frayed northern edge of Zenith,
miles nearer Mohalis and the University than her hospital had been;
a square white and blue room, with blotchy but shoulder-wise
chairs.  It looked out on breezy, stubbly waste land reaching to
distant glittering railroad tracks.  The landlady was a round
German woman with an eye for romance.  It is doubtful if she ever
believed that they were married.  She was a good woman.

Leora's trunk had come.  Her stenography books were primly set out
on her little table and her pink felt slippers were arranged
beneath the white iron bed.  Martin stood with her at the window,
mad with the pride of proprietorship.  Suddenly he was so weak, so
tired, that the mysterious cement which holds cell to cell seemed
dissolved, and he felt that he was collapsing.  But with knees
rigidly straightening, his head back, his lips tight across his
teeth, he caught himself, and cried, "Our first home!"

That he should be with her, quiet, none disturbing, was
intoxication.

The commonplace room shone with peculiar light; the vigorous weeds
and rough grass of the waste land were radiant under the April sun,
and sparrows were cheeping.

"Yes," said Leora, with voice, then hungry lips.



IV


Leora attended the Zenith University of Business Administration and
Finance, which title indicated that it was a large and quite
reasonably bad school for stenographers, bookkeepers, and such sons
of Zenith brewers and politicians as were unable to enter even
state universities.  She trotted daily to the car-line, a neat,
childish figure with note-books and sharpened pencils, to vanish in
the horde of students.  It was six months before she had learned
enough stenography to obtain a place in an insurance office.

Till Martin graduated they kept that room, their home, ever dearer.
No one was so domestic as these birds of passage.  At least two
evenings a week Martin dashed in from Mohalis and studied there.
She had a genius for keeping out of his way, for not demanding to
be noticed, so that, while he plunged into his books as he never
had done in Clif's rustling, grunting, expectorating company, he
had ever the warm, half-conscious feeling of her presence.
Sometimes, at midnight, just as he began to realize that he was
hungry, he would find that a plate of sandwiches had by silent
magic appeared at his elbow.  He was none the less affectionate
because he did not comment.  She made him secure.  She shut out the
world that had pounded at him.

On their walks, at dinner, in the dissolute and deliciously
wasteful quarter-hour when they sat on the edge of the bed with
comforters wrapped about them and smoked an inexcusable cigarette
before breakfast, he explained his work to her, and when her own
studying was done, she tried to read whichever of his books was not
in use.  Knowing nothing, never learning much, of the actual
details of medicine, yet she understood--better it may be than
Angus Duer--his philosophy and the basis of his work.  If he had
given up Gottlieb-worship and his yearning for the laboratory as
for a sanctuary, if he had resolved to be a practical and wealth-
mastering doctor, yet something of Gottlieb's spirit remained.  He
wanted to look behind details and impressive-sounding lists of
technical terms for the causes of things, for general rules which
might reduce the chaos of dissimilar and contradictory symptoms to
the orderliness of chemistry.

Saturday evening they went solemnly to the motion pictures--one-
and two-reel films with Cowboy Billy Anderson and a girl later to
be famous as Mary Pickford--and solemnly they discussed the non-
existent plots as they returned, unconscious of other people on the
streets; but when they walked into the country on a Sunday (with
four sandwiches and a bottle of ginger ale in his threadbare
pockets), he chased her up-hill and down-gully, and they lost their
solemnity in joyous childishness.  He intended, when he came to her
room in the evening, to catch the owl-car to Mohalis and be near
his work when he woke in the morning.  He was resolute about it,
always, and she admired his efficiency, but he never caught the
car.  The crew of the six o'clock morning interurban became used to
a pale, quick-moving young man who sat hunched in a back seat,
devouring large red books, absently gnawing a rather dreadful
doughnut.  But in this young man there was none of the heaviness of
workers dragged out of bed at dawn for another gray and futile day
of labor.  He appeared curiously determined, curiously content.

It was all so much easier, now that he was partly freed from the
tyrannical honesty of Gottliebism, from the unswerving quest for
causes which, as it drove through layer below layer, seemed ever
farther from the bottommost principles, from the intolerable strain
of learning day by day how much he did not know.  It warmed him to
escape from Gottlieb's ice-box into Dean Silva's neighborly world.

Now and then he saw Gottlieb on the campus.  They bowed in
embarrassment and passed in haste.



V


There seemed to be no division between his Junior and Senior years.
Because of the time he had lost, he had to remain in Mohalis all
summer.  The year and a half from his marriage to his graduation
was one whirling bewilderment, without seasons or dates.

When he had, as they put it, "cut out his nonsense and buckled down
to work," he had won the admiration of Dr. Silva and all the Good
Students, especially Angus Duer and the Reverend Ira Hinkley.
Martin had always announced that he did not care for their
approbation, for the applause of commonplace drudges, but now that
he had it, he prized it.  However much he scoffed, he was gratified
when he was treated as a peer by Angus, who spent the summer as
extern in the Zenith General Hospital, and who already had the
unapproachable dignity of a successful young surgeon.

Through that hot summer Martin and Leora labored, panting, and when
they sat in her room, over their books and a stout pot of beer,
neither their costumes nor their language had the decorum which one
ought to expect from a romantic pair devoted to science and high
endeavor.  They were not very modest.  Leora came to use, in her
casual way, such words, such ancient Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, as
would have dismayed Angus or Bert Tozer.  On their evenings off
they went economically to an imitation Coney Island beside a scummy
and stinking lake, and with grave pleasure they ate Hot Dogs,
painstakingly they rode the scenic railway.

Their chief appetizer was Clif Clawson.  Clif was never willingly
alone or silent except when he was asleep.  It is probable that his
success in motor-salesmanship came entirely from his fondness for
the enormous amounts of bright conversation which seem necessary in
that occupation.  How much of his attention to Martin and Leora was
friendliness and how much of it was due to his fear of being alone
cannot be determined, but certainly he entertained them and drew
them out of themselves, and never seemed offended by the surly
unwillingness with which Martin was sometimes guilty of greeting
him.

He would come roaring up to the house in a motor, the muffler
always cut out.  He would shout at their window, "Come on, you
guys!  Come out of it!  Shake a leg!  Lez have a little drive and
get cooled off, and then I'll buy you a feed."

That Martin had to work, Clif never comprehended.  There was small
excuse for Martin's occasional brutality in showing his annoyance
but, now that he was fulfilled in Leora and quite thoroughly and
selfishly careless as to what hungry need others might have of
himself, now that he was in a rut of industry and satisfied
companionship, he was bored by Clif's unchanging flood of heavy
humor.  It was Leora who was courteous.  She had heard rather too
often the seven jokes which, under varying guises, made up all of
Clif's humor and philosophy, but she could sit for hours looking
amiable while Clif told how clever he was at selling, and she
sturdily reminded Martin that they would never have a friend more
loyal or generous.

But Clif went to New York, to a new motor agency, and Martin and
Leora were more completely and happily dependent on each other than
ever before.

Their last agitation was removed by the complacence of Mr. Tozer.
He was cordial now in all his letters, however much he irritated
them by the parental advice with which he penalized them for every
check he sent.



VI


None of the hectic activities of Senior year--neurology and
pediatrics, practical work in obstetrics, taking of case-histories
in the hospitals, attendance on operations, dressing wounds,
learning not to look embarrassed when charity patients called one
"Doctor"--was quite so important as the discussion of "What shall
we do after graduation?"

Is it necessary to be an intern for more than a year?  Shall we
remain general practitioners all our lives, or work toward becoming
specialists?  Which specialties are the best--that is, the best
paid?  Shall we settle in the country or in the city?  How about
going West?  What about the army medical corps; salutes, riding-
boots, pretty women, travel?

This discussion they harried in the corridors of Main Medical, at
the hospital, at lunch-rooms; and when Martin came home to Leora he
went through it all again, very learnedly, very explanatorily.
Almost every evening he "reached a decision" which was undecided
again by morning.

Once when Dr. Loizeau, professor of surgery, had operated before a
clinic which included several renowned visiting doctors--the small
white figure of the surgeon below them, slashing between life and
death, dramatic as a great actor taking his curtain-call--Martin
came away certain that he was for surgery.  He agreed then with
Angus Duer, who had just won the Hugh Loizeau Medal in Experimental
Surgery, that the operator was the lion, the eagle, the soldier
among doctors.  Angus was one of the few who knew without wavering
precisely what he was going to do: after his internship he was to
join the celebrated Chicago clinic headed by Dr. Rouncefield, the
eminent abdominal surgeon.  He would, he said briefly, be making
twenty thousand a year as a surgeon within five years.

Martin explained it all to Leora.  Surgery.  Drama.  Fearless
nerves.  Adoring assistants.  Save lives.  Science in devising new
techniques.  Make money--not be commercial, of course, but provide
Leora with comforts.  To Europe--they two together--gray London.
Viennese cafes.  Leora was useful to him during his oration.  She
blandly agreed; and the next evening, when he sought to prove that
surgery was all rot and most surgeons merely good carpenters, she
agreed more amiably than ever.

Next to Angus, and the future medical missionary, Ira Hinkley,
Fatty Pfaff was the first to discover what his future was.  He was
going to be an obstetrician--or, as the medical students called it
technically, a "baby-snatcher."  Fatty had the soul of a midwife;
he sympathized with women in their gasping agony, sympathized
honestly and almost tearfully, and he was magnificent at sitting
still and drinking tea and waiting.  During his first obstetrical
case, when the student with him was merely nervous as they fidgeted
by the bed in the hard desolation of the hospital room, Fatty was
terrified, and he longed as he had never longed for anything in his
flabby yet wistful life to comfort this gray-faced, straining,
unknown woman, to take her pains on himself.

While the others drifted, often by chance, often through relatives,
into their various classes, Martin remained doubtful.  He admired
Dean Silva's insistence on the physician's immediate service to
mankind, but he could not forget the cool ascetic hours in the
laboratory.  Toward the end of Senior year, decision became
necessary, and he was moved by a speech in which Dean Silva
condemned too much specialization and pictured the fine old country
doctor, priest and father of his people, sane under open skies,
serene in self-conquest.  On top of this came urgent letters from
Mr. Tozer, begging Martin to settle in Wheatsylvania.

Tozer loved his daughter, apparently, and more or less liked
Martin, and he wanted them near him.  Wheatsylvania was a "good
location," he said: solid Scandinavian and Dutch and German and
Bohemian farmers who paid their bills.  The nearest doctor was
Hesselink, at Groningen, nine and a half miles away, and Hesselink
had more than he could do.  If they would come, he would help
Martin buy his equipment: he would even send him a check now and
then during his two-year hospital internship.  Martin's capital was
practically gone.  Angus Duer and he had received appointments to
Zenith General Hospital, where he would have an incomparable
training, but Zenith General gave its interns, for the first year,
nothing but board and room, and he had feared that he could not
take the appointment.  Tozer's offer excited him.  All night Leora
and he sat up working themselves into enthusiasm about the freedom
of the West, about the kind hearts and friendly hands of the
pioneers, about the heroism and usefulness of country doctors, and
this time they reached a decision which remained decided.

They would settle in Wheatsylvania.

If he ached a little for research and Gottlieb's divine curiosity--
well, he would be such a country doctor as Robert Koch!  He would
not degenerate into a bridge-playing, duck-hunting drone.  He would
have a small laboratory of his own.  So he came to the end of the
year and graduated, looking rather flustered in his cap and gown.
Angus stood first and Martin seventh in the class.  He said good-
by, with lamentations and considerable beer; he found a room for
Leora nearer to the hospital; and he emerged as Martin L.
Arrowsmith, M.D., house physician in the Zenith General Hospital.




Chapter 11



The Boardman Box Factory was afire.  All South Zenith was agitated
by the glare on the low-hung clouds, the smell of scorched timber,
the infernal bells of charging fire-apparatus.  Miles of small
wooden houses west of the factory were threatened, and shawled
women, tousled men in trousers over nightshirts, tumbled out of bed
and came running with a thick mutter of footsteps in the night-
chilled streets.

With professional calmness, firemen in helmets were stoking the
dripping engines.  Policemen tramped in front of the press of
people, swinging their clubs, shouting, "Get back there, you!"  The
fire-line was sacred.  Only the factory-owner and the reporters
were admitted.  A crazy-eyed factory-hand was stopped by a police
sergeant.

"My tools are in there!" he shrieked.

"That don't make no never-minds," bawled the strutting sergeant.
"NOBODY can't get through here!"

But one got through.  They heard the blang-blang-blang of a racing
ambulance, incessant, furious, defiant.  Without orders, the crowd
opened, and through them, almost grazing them, slid the huge gray
car.  At the back, haughty in white uniform, nonchalant on a narrow
seat, was The Doctor--Martin Arrowsmith.

The crowd admired him, the policemen sprang to receive him.

"Where's the fireman got hurt?" he snapped.

"Over in that shed," cried the police sergeant, running beside the
ambulance.

"Drive over closer.  Nev' mind the smoke!" Martin barked at the
driver.

A lieutenant of firemen led him to a pile of sawdust on which was
huddled an unconscious youngster, his face bloodless and clammy.

"He got a bad dose of smoke from the green lumber and keeled over.
Fine kid.  Is he a goner?" the lieutenant begged.

Martin knelt by the man, felt his pulse, listened to his breathing.
Brusquely opening a black bag, he gave him a hypodermic of
strychnin and held a vial of ammonia to his nose.  "He'll come
around.  Here, you two, getum into the ambulance--hustle!"

The police sergeant and the newest probationer patrolman sprang
together, and together they mumbled, "All right, Doc."

To Martin came the chief reporter of the Advocate-Times.  In years
he was only twenty-nine, but he was the oldest and perhaps the most
cynical man in the world.  He had interviewed senators; he had
discovered graft in charity societies and even in prize-fights.
There were fine wrinkles beside his eyes, he rolled Bull Durham
cigarettes constantly, and his opinion of man's honor and woman's
virtue was but low.  Yet to Martin, or at least to The Doctor, he
was polite.

"Will he pull through, Doc?" he twanged.

"Sure, I think so.  Suffocation.  Heart's still going."

Martin yelped the last words from the step at the back of the
ambulance as it went bumping and rocking through the factory yard,
through the bitter smoke, toward the shrinking crowd.  He owned and
commanded the city, he and the driver.  They ignored traffic
regulations, they disdained the people, returning from theaters and
movies, who dotted the streets which unrolled before the flying
gray hood.  Let 'em get out of the way!  The traffic officer at
Chickasaw and Twentieth heard them coming, speeding like the
Midnight Express--urrrrrr--blang-blang-blang-blang--and cleared the
noisy corner.  People were jammed against the curb, threatened by
rearing horses and backing motors, and past them hurled the
ambulance, blang-blang-blang-blang, with The Doctor holding a strap
and swinging easily on his perilous seat.

At the hospital, the hall-man cried, "Shooting case in the Arbor,
Doc."

"All right.  Wait'll I sneak in a drink," said Martin placidly.  On
the way to his room he passed the open door of the hospital
laboratory, with its hacked bench, its lifeless rows of flasks and
test-tubes.

"Huh!  That stuff!  Poking 'round labs!  This is real sure-enough
life," he exulted, and he did not permit himself to see the vision
of Max Gottlieb waiting there, so gaunt, so tired, so patient.



II


The six interns in Zenith General, including Martin and Angus Duer,
lived in a long dark room with six camp beds, and six bureaus
fantastic with photographs and ties and undarned socks.  They spent
hours sitting on their beds, arguing surgery versus internal
medicine, planning the dinners which they hoped to enjoy on their
nights off, and explaining to Martin, as the only married man, the
virtues of the various nurses with whom, one by one, they fell in
love.

Martin found the hospital routine slightly dull.  Though he
developed the Intern's Walk, that quick corridor step with the
stethoscope conspicuous in the pocket, he did not, he could not,
develop the bedside manner.  He was sorry for the bruised,
yellowed, suffering patients, always changing as to individuals and
never changing as a mass of drab pain, but when he had thrice
dressed a wound, he had had enough; he wanted to go on to new
experiences.  Yet the ambulance work outside the hospital was
endlessly stimulating to his pride.

The Doctor, and The Doctor alone, was safe by night in the slum
called "the Arbor."  His black bag was a pass.  Policemen saluted
him, prostitutes bowed to him without mockery, saloon-keepers
called out, "Evenin', Doc," and hold-up men stood back in doorways
to let him pass.  Martin had power, the first obvious power in his
life.  And he was led into incessant adventure.

He took a bank-president out of a dive; he helped the family
conceal the disgrace; he irritably refused their bribe; and
afterward, when he thought of how he might have dined with Leora,
he was sorry he had refused it.  He broke into hotel-rooms reeking
with gas and revived would-be suicides.  He drank Trinidad rum with
a Congressman who advocated prohibition.  He attended a policeman
assaulted by strikers, and a striker assaulted by policemen.  He
assisted at an emergency abdominal operation at three o'clock in
the morning.  The operating-room--white tile walls and white tile
floor and glittering frosted-glass skylight--seemed lined with
fire-lit ice, and the large incandescents glared on the glass
instrument cases, the cruel little knives.  The surgeon, in long
white gown, white turban, and pale orange rubber gloves, made his
swift incision in the square of yellowish flesh exposed between
towels, cutting deep into layers of fat, and Martin looked on
unmoved as the first blood menacingly followed the cut.  And a
month after, during the Chaloosa River flood, he worked for
seventy-six hours, with half-hours of sleep in the ambulance or on
a police-station table.

He landed from a boat at what had been the second story of a
tenement and delivered a baby on the top floor; he bound up heads
and arms for a line of men; but what gave him glory was the
perfectly foolhardy feat of swimming the flood to save five
children marooned and terrified on a bobbing church pew.  The
newspapers gave him large headlines, and when he had returned to
kiss Leora and sleep twelve hours, he lay and thought about
research with salty self-defensive scorn.

"Gottlieb, the poor old impractical fusser!  I'd like to see him
swim that current!" jeered Dr. Arrowsmith to Martin.

But on night duty, alone, he had to face the self he had been
afraid to uncover, and he was homesick for the laboratory, for the
thrill of uncharted discoveries, the quest below the surface and
beyond the moment, the search for fundamental laws which the
scientist (however blasphemously and colloquially he may describe
it) exalts above temporary healing as the religious exalts the
nature and terrible glory of God above pleasant daily virtues.
With this sadness there was envy that he should be left out of
things, that others should go ahead of him, ever surer in
technique, more widely aware of the phenomena of biological
chemistry, more deeply daring to explain laws at which the pioneers
had but fumbled and hinted.

In his second year of internship, when the thrills of fires and
floods and murder became as obvious a routine as bookkeeping, when
he had seen the strangely few ways in which mankind can contrive to
injure themselves and slaughter one another, when it was merely
wearing to have to live up to the pretentiousness of being The
Doctor, Martin tried to satisfy and perhaps kill his guilty
scientific lust by voluntary scrabbling about the hospital
laboratory, correlating the blood counts in pernicious anemia.  His
trifling with the drug of research was risky.  Amid the bustle of
operations he began to picture the rapt quietude of the laboratory.
"I better cut this out," he said to Leora, "if I'm going to settle
down in Wheatsylvania and tend to business and make a living--and I
by golly am!"

Dean Silva often came to the hospital on consultations.  He passed
through the lobby one evening when Leora, returned from the office
where she was a stenographer, was meeting Martin for dinner.
Martin introduced them, and the little man held her hand, purred at
her, and squeaked, "Will you children give me the pleasure of
taking you to dinner?  My wife has deserted me.  I am a lone and
misanthropic man."

He trotted between them, round and happy.  Martin and he were not
student and teacher, but two doctors together, for Dean Silva was
one pedagogue who could still be interested in a man who no longer
sat at his feet.  He led the two starvelings to a chop-house and in
a settle-walled booth he craftily stuffed them with roast goose and
mugs of ale.

He concentrated on Leora, but his talk was of Martin:

"Your husband must be an Artist Healer, not a picker of trifles
like these laboratory men."

"But Gottlieb's no picker of trifles," insisted Martin.

"No-o.  But with him--  It's a difference of one's gods.
Gottlieb's gods are the cynics, the destroyers--crapehangers the
vulgar call 'em: Diderot and Voltaire and Elser; great men, wonder-
workers, yet men that had more fun destroying other people's
theories than creating their own.  But my gods now, they're the men
who took the discoveries of Gottlieb's gods and turned them to the
use of human beings--made them come alive!

"All credit to the men who invented paint and canvas, but there's
more credit, eh? to the Raphaels and Holbeins who used those
discoveries!  Laennec and Osler, those are the men!  It's all very
fine, this business of pure research: seeking the truth, unhampered
by commercialism or fame-chasing.  Getting to the bottom.  Ignoring
consequences and practical uses.  But do you realize if you carry
that idea far enough, a man could justify himself for doing nothing
but count the cobblestones on Warehouse Avenue--yes and justify
himself for torturing people just to see how they screamed--and
then sneer at a man who was making millions of people well and
happy!

"No, no!  Mrs. Arrowsmith, this lad Martin is a passionate fellow,
not a drudge.  He must be passionate on behalf of mankind.  He's
chosen the highest calling in the world, but he's a feckless,
experimental devil.  You must keep him at it, my dear, and not let
the world lose the benefit of his passion."

After this solemnity Dad Silva took them to a musical comedy and
sat between them, patting Martin's shoulder, patting Leora's arm,
choking with delight when the comedian stepped into the pail of
whitewash.  In midnight volubility Martin and Leora sputtered their
affection for him, and saw their Wheatsylvania venture as glory and
salvation.

But a few days before the end of Martin's internship and their
migration to North Dakota, they met Max Gottlieb on the street.

Martin had not seen him for more than a year; Leora never.  He
looked worried and ill.  While Martin was agonizing as to whether
to pass with a bow, Gottlieb stopped.

"How is everything, Martin?" he said cordially.  But his eyes said,
"Why have you never come back to me?"

The boy stammered something, nothing, and when Gottlieb had gone
by, stooped and moving as in pain, he longed to run after him.

Leora was demanding, "Is that the Professor Gottlieb you're always
talking about?"

"Yes.  Say!  How does he strike you?"

"I don't--Sandy, he's the greatest man I've ever seen!  I don't
know how I know, but he is!  Dr. Silva is a darling, but that was a
GREAT man!  I wish--I wish we were going to see him again.  There's
the first man I ever laid eyes on that I'd leave you for, if he
wanted me.  He's so--oh, he's like a sword--no, he's like a brain
walking.  Oh, Sandy, he looked so wretched.  I wanted to cry.  I'd
black his shoes!"

"God!  So would I!"

But in the bustle of leaving Zenith, the excitement of the journey
to Wheatsylvania, the scramble of his state examinations, the
dignity of being a Practicing Physician, he forgot Gottlieb, and on
that Dakota prairie radiant in early June, with meadow larks on
every fence post, he began his work.




Chapter 12



At the moment when Martin met him on the street, Gottlieb was
ruined.

Max Gottlieb was a German Jew, born in Saxony in 1850.  Though he
took his medical degree, at Heidelberg, he was never interested in
practicing medicine.  He was a follower of Helmholtz, and youthful
researches in the physics of sound convinced him of the need of the
quantitative method in the medical sciences.  Then Koch's
discoveries drew him into biology.  Always an elaborately careful
worker, a maker of long rows of figures, always realizing the
presence of uncontrollable variables, always a vicious assailant of
what he considered slackness or lie or pomposity, never too kindly
to well-intentioned stupidity, he worked in the laboratories of
Koch, of Pasteur, he followed the early statements of Pearson in
biometrics, he drank beer and wrote vitriolic letters, he voyaged
to Italy and England and Scandinavia, and casually, between two
days, he married (as he might have bought a coat or hired a
housekeeper) the patient and wordless daughter of a Gentile
merchant.

Then began a series of experiments, very important, very
undramatic-sounding, very long, and exceedingly unappreciated.
Back in 1881 he was confirming Pasteur's results in chicken cholera
immunity and, for relief and pastime, trying to separate an enzyme
from yeast.  A few years later, living on the tiny inheritance from
his father, a petty banker, and quite carelessly and cheerfully
exhausting it, he was analyzing critically the ptomain theory of
disease, and investigating the mechanism of the attenuation of
virulence of microorganisms.  He got thereby small fame.  Perhaps
he was over-cautious, and more than the devil or starvation he
hated men who rushed into publication unprepared.

Though he meddled little in politics, considering them the most
repetitious and least scientific of human activities, he was a
sufficiently patriotic German to hate the Junkers.  As a youngster
he had a fight or two with ruffling subalterns; once he spent a
week in jail; often he was infuriated by discriminations against
Jews: and at forty he went sadly off to the America which could
never become militaristic or anti-Semitic--to the Hoagland
Laboratory in Brooklyn, then to Queen City University as professor
of bacteriology.

Here he made his first investigation of toxin-anti-toxin reactions.
He announced that antibodies, excepting antitoxin, had no relation
to the immune state of an animal, and while he himself was being
ragingly denounced in the small but hectic world of scientists, he
dealt calmly and most brutally with Yersin's and Marmorek's
theories of sera.

His dearest dream, now and for years of racking research, was the
artificial production of antitoxin--its production in vitro.  Once
he was prepared to publish, but he found an error and rigidly
suppressed his notes.  All the while he was lonely.  There was
apparently no one in Queen City who regarded him as other than a
cranky Jew catching microbes by their little tails and leering at
them--no work for a tall man at a time when heroes were building
bridges, experimenting with Horseless Carriages, writing the first
of the poetic Compelling Ads, and selling miles of calico and
cigars.

In 1899 he was called to the University of Winnemac, as professor
of bacteriology in the medical school, and here he drudged on for a
dozen years.  Not once did he talk of results of the sort called
"practical"; not once did he cease warring on the post hoc propter
hoc conclusions which still make up most medical lore; not once did
he fail to be hated by his colleagues, who were respectful to his
face, uncomfortable in feeling his ironic power, but privily joyous
to call him Mephisto, Diabolist, Killjoy, Pessimist, Destructive
Critic, Flippant Cynic, Scientific Bounder Lacking in Dignity and
Seriousness, Intellectual Snob, Pacifist, Anarchist, Atheist, Jew.
They said, with reason, that he was so devoted to Pure Science, to
art for art's sake, that he would rather have people die by the
right therapy than be cured by the wrong.  Having built a shrine
for humanity, he wanted to kick out of it all mere human beings.

The total number of his papers, in a brisk scientific realm where
really clever people published five times a year, was not more than
twenty-five in thirty years.  They were all exquisitely finished,
all easily reduplicated and checked by the doubtfulest critics.

At Mohalis he was pleased by large facilities for work, by
excellent assistants, endless glassware, plenty of guinea pigs,
enough monkeys; but he was bored by the round of teaching, and
melancholy again in a lack of understanding friends.  Always he
sought someone to whom he could talk without suspicion or caution.
He was human enough, when he meditated upon the exaltation of
doctors bold through ignorance, of inventors who were but tinkers
magnified, to be irritated by his lack of fame in America, even in
Mohalis, and to complain not too nobly.

He had never dined with a duchess, never received a prize, never
been interviewed, never produced anything which the public could
understand, nor experienced anything since his schoolboy amours
which nice people could regard as romantic.  He was, in fact, an
authentic scientist.

He was of the great benefactors of humanity.  There will never, in
any age, be an effort to end the great epidemics or the petty
infections which will not have been influenced by Max Gottlieb's
researches, for he was not one who tagged and prettily classified
bacteria and protozoa.  He sought their chemistry, the laws of
their existence and destruction, basic laws for the most part
unknown after a generation of busy biologists.  Yet they were right
who called him "pessimist," for this man who, as much as any other,
will have been the cause of reducing infectious diseases to almost-
zero often doubted the value of reducing infectious diseases at
all.

He reflected (it was an international debate in which he was joined
by a few and damned by many) that half a dozen generations nearly
free from epidemics would produce a race so low in natural immunity
that when a great plague, suddenly springing from almost-zero to a
world-smothering cloud, appeared again, it might wipe out the world
entire, so that the measures to save lives to which he lent his
genius might in the end be the destruction of all human life.

He meditated that if science and public hygiene did remove
tuberculosis and the other major plagues, the world was grimly
certain to become so overcrowded, to become such a universal slave-
packed shambles, that all beauty and ease and wisdom would
disappear in a famine-driven scamper for existence.  Yet these
speculations never checked his work.  If the future became
overcrowded, the future must by birth-control or otherwise look to
itself.  Perhaps it would, he reflected.  But even this drop of
wholesome optimism was lacking in his final doubts.  For he doubted
all progress of the intellect and the emotions, and he doubted,
most of all, the superiority of divine mankind to the cheerful
dogs, the infallibly graceful cats, the unmoral and unagitated and
irreligious horses, the superbly adventuring seagulls.

While medical quacks, manufacturers of patent medicines, chewing-
gum salesmen, and high priests of advertising lived in large
houses, attended by servants, and took their sacred persons abroad
in limousines, Max Gottlieb dwelt in a cramped cottage whose paint
was peeling, and rode to his laboratory on an ancient and squeaky
bicycle.  Gottlieb himself protested rarely.  He was not so
unreasonable--usually--as to demand both freedom and the fruits of
popular slavery.  "Why," he once said to Martin, "should the world
pay me for doing what I want and what they do not want?"

If in his house there was but one comfortable chair, on his desk
were letters, long, intimate, and respectful, from the great ones
of France and Germany, Italy and Denmark, and from scientists whom
Great Britain so much valued that she gave them titles almost as
high as those with which she rewarded distillers, cigarette-
manufacturers, and the owners of obscene newspapers.

But poverty kept him from fulfillment of his summer longing to sit
beneath the poplars by the Rhine or the tranquil Seine, at a table
on whose checkered cloth were bread and cheese and wine and dusky
cherries, those ancient and holy simplicities of all the world.



II


Max Gottlieb's wife was thick and slow-moving and mute; at sixty
she had not learned to speak easy English; and her German was of
the small-town bourgeois, who pay their debts and over-eat and grow
red.  If he was not confidential with her, if at table he forgot
her in long reflections, neither was he unkind or impatient, and he
depended on her housekeeping, her warming of his old-fashioned
nightgown.  She had not been well of late.  She had nausea and
indigestion, but she kept on with her work.  Always you heard her
old slippers slapping about the house.

They had three children, all born when Gottlieb was over thirty-
eight: Miriam, the youngest, an ardent child who had a touch at the
piano, an instinct about Beethoven, and hatred for the "ragtime"
popular in America; an older sister who was nothing in particular;
and their boy Robert--Robert Koch Gottlieb.  He was a wild thing
and a distress.  They sent him, with anxiety over the cost, to a
smart school near Zenith, where he met the sons of manufacturers
and discovered a taste for fast motors and eccentric clothes, and
no taste what ever for studying.  At home he clamored that his
father was a "tightwad."  When Gottlieb sought to make it clear
that he was a poor man, the boy answered that out of his poverty he
was always sneakingly spending money on his researches--he had no
right to do that and shame his son--let the confounded University
provide him with material!



III


There were few of Gottlieb's students who saw him and his learning
as anything but hurdles to be leaped as quickly as possible.  One
of the few was Martin Arrowsmith.

However harshly he may have pointed out Martin's errors, however
loftily he may have seemed to ignore his devotion, Gottlieb was as
aware of Martin as Martin of him.  He planned vast things.  If
Martin really desired his help (Gottlieb could be as modest
personally as he was egotistic and swaggering in competitive
science), he would make the boy's career his own.  During Martin's
minute original research, Gottlieb rejoiced in his willingness to
abandon conventional--and convenient--theories of immunology and in
the exasperated carefulness with which he checked results.  When
Martin for unknown reasons became careless, when he was obviously
drinking too much, obviously mixed up in some absurd personal
affair, it was tragic hunger for friends and flaming respect for
excellent work which drove Gottlieb to snarl at him.  Of the
apologies demanded by Silva he had no notion.  He would have raged--

He waited for Martin to return.  He blamed himself:  "Fool!  There
was a fine spirit.  You should have known one does not use a
platinum loop for shoveling coal."  As long as he could (while
Martin was dish-washing and wandering on improbable trains between
impossible towns), he put off the appointment of a new assistant.
Then all his wistfulness chilled to anger.  He considered Martin a
traitor, and put him out of his mind.



IV


It is possible that Max Gottlieb was a genius.  Certainly he was
mad as any genius.  He did, during the period of Martin's
internship in Zenith General, a thing more preposterous than any of
the superstitions at which he scoffed.

He tried to become an executive and a reformer!  He, the cynic, the
anarch, tried to found an Institution, and he went at it like a
spinster organizing a league to keep small boys from learning
naughty words.

He conceived that there might, in this world, be a medical school
which should be altogether scientific, ruled by exact quantitative
biology and chemistry, with spectacle-fitting and most of surgery
ignored, and he further conceived that such an enterprise might be
conducted at the University of Winnemac!  He tried to be practical
about it; oh, he was extremely practical and plausible!

"I admit we should not be able to turn out doctors to cure village
bellyaches.  And ordinary physicians are admirable and altogether
necessary--perhaps.  But there are too many of them already.  And
on the 'practical' side, you gif me twenty years of a school that
is precise and cautious, and we shall cure diabetes, maybe
tuberculosis and cancer, and all these arthritis things that the
carpenters shake their heads at them and call them 'rheumatism.'
So!"

He did not desire the control of such a school, nor any credit.  He
was too busy.  But at a meeting of the American Academy of Sciences
he met one Dr. Entwisle, a youngish physiologist from Harvard, who
would make an excellent dean.  Entwisle admired him, and sounded
him on his willingness to be called to Harvard.  When Gottlieb
outlined his new sort of medical school, Entwisle was fervent.
"Nothing I'd like so much as to have a chance at a place like
that," he fluttered, and Gottlieb went back to Mohalis triumphant.
He was the more assured because (though he sardonically refused it)
he was at this time offered the medical deanship of the University
of West Chippewa.

So simple, or so insane, was he that he wrote to Dean Silva
politely bidding him step down and hand over his school--his work,
his life--to an unknown teacher in Harvard!  A courteous old
gentleman was Dad Silva, a fit disciple of Osler, but this
incredible letter killed his patience.  He replied that while he
could see the value of basic research, the medical school belonged
to the people of the state, and its task was to provide them with
immediate and practical attention.  For himself, he hinted, if he
ever believed that the school would profit by his resignation he
would go at once, but he needed a rather broader suggestion than a
letter from one of his own subordinates!

Gottlieb retorted with spirit and indiscretion.  He damned the
People of the State of Winnemac.  Were they, in their present
condition of nincompoopery, worth any sort of attention?  He
unjustifiably took his demand over Silva's head to that great
orator and patriot, Dr. Horace Greeley Truscott, president of the
University.

President Truscott said, "Really, I'm too engrossed to consider
chimerical schemes, however ingenious they may be."

"You are too busy to consider anything but selling honorary degrees
to millionaires for gymnasiums," remarked Gottlieb.

Next day he was summoned to a special meeting of the University
Council.  As head of the medical department of bacteriology,
Gottlieb was a member of this all-ruling body, and when he entered
the long Council Chamber, with its gilt ceiling, its heavy maroon
curtains, its somber paintings of pioneers, he started for his
usual seat, unconscious of the knot of whispering members,
meditating on far-off absorbing things.

"Oh, uh, Professor Gottlieb, will you please sit down there at the
far end of the table?" called President Truscott.

Then Gottlieb was aware of tensions.  He saw that out of the seven
members of the Board of Regents, the four who lived in or near
Zenith were present.  He saw that sitting beside Truscott was not
the dean of the academic department but Dean Silva.  He saw that
however easily they talked, they were looking at him through the
mist of their chatter.

President Truscott announced, "Gentlemen, this joint meeting of the
Council and the regents is to consider charges against Professor
Max Gottlieb preferred by his dean and by myself."

Gottlieb suddenly looked old.

"These charges are:  Disloyalty to his dean, his president, his
regents and to the State of Winnemac.  Disloyalty to recognized
medical and scholastic ethics.  Insane egotism.  Atheism.
Persistent failure to collaborate with his colleagues, and such
inability to understand practical affairs as makes it dangerous to
let him conduct the important laboratories and classes with which
we have entrusted him.  Gentlemen, I shall now prove each of these
points, from Professor Gottlieb's own letters to Dean Silva."

He proved them.

The chairman of the Board of Regents suggested, "Gottlieb, I think
it would simplify things if you just handed us your resignation and
permitted us to part in good feeling, instead of having the
unpleasant--"

"I'm damned if I will resign!"  Gottlieb was on his feet, a lean
fury.  "Because you all haf schoolboy minds, golf-links minds, you
are twisting my expression, and perfectly accurate expression, of a
sound revolutionary ideal, which would personally to me be of no
value or advantage whatefer, into a desire to steal promotions.
That fools should judge honor--!"  His long forefinger was a fish-
hook, reaching for President Truscott's soul.  "No!  I will not
resign!  You can cast me out!"

"I'm afraid, then, we must ask you to leave the room while we
vote."  The president was very suave, for so large and strong and
hearty a man.

Gottlieb rode his wavering bicycle to the laboratory.  It was by
telephone message from a brusque girl clerk in the president's
office that he was informed that "his resignation had been
accepted."

He agonized, "Discharge me?  They couldn't!  I'm the chief glory,
the only glory, of this shopkeepers' school!"  When he comprehended
that apparently they very much had discharged him, he was shamed
that he should have given them a chance to kick him.  But the
really dismaying thing was that he should by an effort to be a
politician have interrupted the sacred work.

He required peace and a laboratory, at once.

They'd see what fools they were when they heard that Harvard had
called him!

He was eager for the mellower ways of Cambridge and Boston.  Why
had he remained so long in raw Mohalis?  He wrote to Dr. Entwisle,
hinting that he was willing to hear an offer.  He expected a
telegram.  He waited a week, then had a long letter from Entwisle
admitting that he had been premature in speaking for the Harvard
faculty.  Entwisle presented the faculty's compliments and their
hope that some time they might have the honor of his presence, but
as things were now--

Gottlieb wrote to the University of West Chippewa that, after all,
he was willing to think about their medical deanship . . . and had
answer that the place was filled, that they had not greatly liked
the tone of his former letter, and they did not "care to go into
the matter further."

At sixty-one, Gottlieb had saved but a few hundred dollars--
literally a few hundred.  Like any bricklayer out of work, he had
to have a job or go hungry.  He was no longer a genius impatient of
interrupted creation but a shabby schoolmaster in disgrace.

He prowled through his little brown house, fingering papers,
staring at his wife, staring at old pictures, staring at nothing.
He still had a month of teaching--they had dated ahead the
resignation which they had written for him--but he was too
dispirited to go to the laboratory.  He felt unwanted, almost
unsafe.  His ancient sureness was broken into self-pity.  He waited
from delivery to delivery for the mail.  Surely there would be aid
from somebody who knew what he was, what he meant.  There were many
friendly letters about research, but the sort of men with whom he
corresponded did not listen to intercollegiate faculty tattle nor
know of his need.

He could not, after the Harvard mischance and the West Chippewa
rebuke, approach the universities or the scientific institutes, and
he was too proud to write begging letters to the men who revered
him.  No, he would be business-like!  He applied to a Chicago
teachers' agency, and received a stilted answer promising to look
about and inquiring whether he would care to take the position of
teacher of physics and chemistry in a suburban high school.

Before he had sufficiently recovered from his fury to be able to
reply, his household was overwhelmed by his wife's sudden agony.

She had been unwell for months.  He had wanted her to see a
physician, but she had refused, and all the while she was stolidly
terrified by the fear that she had cancer of the stomach.  Now when
she began to vomit blood, she cried to him for help.  The Gottlieb
who scoffed at medical credos, at "carpenters" and "pill mongers,"
had forgotten what he knew of diagnosis, and when he was ill, or
his family, he called for the doctor as desperately as any
backwoods layman to whom illness was the black malignity of unknown
devils.

In unbelievable simplicity he considered that, as his quarrel with
Silva was not personal, he could still summon him, and this time he
was justified.  Silva came, full of excessive benignity, chuckling
to himself, "When he's got something the matter, he doesn't run for
Arrhenius or Jacques Loeb, but for me!"  Into the meager cottage
the little man brought strength, and Gottlieb gazed down on him
trustingly.

Mrs. Gottlieb was suffering.  Silva gave her morphine.  Not without
satisfaction he learned that Gottlieb did not even know the dose.
He examined her--his pudgy hands had the sensitiveness if not the
precision of Gottlieb's skeleton fingers.  He peered about the
airless bedroom: the dark green curtains, the crucifix on the dumpy
bureau, the color-print of a virtuously voluptuous maiden.  He was
bothered by an impression of having recently been in the room.  He
remembered.  It was the twin of the doleful chamber of a German
grocer whom he had seen during a consultation a month ago.

He spoke to Gottlieb not as to a colleague or an enemy but as a
patient, to be cheered.

"Don't think there's any tumorous mass.  As of course you know,
Doctor, you can tell such a lot by the differences in the shape of
the lower border of the ribs, and by the surface of the belly
during deep breathing."

"Oh, yesss."

"I don't think you need to worry in the least.  We'd better hustle
her off to the University Hospital, and we'll give her a test meal
and get her X-rayed and take a look for Boas-Oppler bugs."

She was taken away, heavy, inert, carried down the cottage steps.
Gottlieb was with her.  Whether or not he loved her, whether he was
capable of ordinary domestic affection, could not be discovered.
The need of turning to Dean Silva had damaged his opinion of his
own wisdom.  It was the final affront, more subtle and more
enervating than the offer to teach chemistry to children.  As he
sat by her bed, his dark face was blank, and the wrinkles which
deepened across that mask may have been sorrow, may have been
fear. . . .  Nor is it known how, through the secure and uninvaded
years, he had regarded his wife's crucifix, which Silva had spied on
their bureau--a gaudy plaster crucifix on a box set with gilded
shells.

Silva diagnosed it as probable gastric ulcer, and placed her on
treatment, with light and frequent meals.  She improved, but she
remained in the hospital for four weeks, and Gottlieb wondered:
Are these doctors deceiving us?  Is it really cancer, which by
Their mystic craft They are concealing from me who know naught?

Robbed of her silent assuring presence on which night by weary
night he had depended, he fretted over his daughters, despaired at
their noisy piano-practice, their inability to manage the slattern
maid.  When they had gone to bed he sat alone in the pale
lamplight, unmoving, not reading.  He was bewildered.  His haughty
self was like a robber baron fallen into the hands of rebellious
slaves, stooped under a filthy load, the proud eye rheumy and
patient with despair, the sword hand chopped off, obscene flies
crawling across the gnawed wrist.

It was at this time that he encountered Martin and Leora on the
street in Zenith.

He did not look back when they had passed him, but all that
afternoon he brooded on them.  "That girl, maybe it was she that
stole Martin from me--from science!  No!  He was right.  One sees
what happens to the fools like me!"

On the day after Martin and Leora had started for Wheatsylvania,
singing, Gottlieb went to Chicago to see the teachers' agency.

The firm was controlled by a Live Wire who had once been a county
superintendent of schools.  He was not much interested.  Gottlieb
lost his temper:  "Do you make an endeavor to find positions for
teachers, or do you merely send out circulars to amuse yourself?
Haf you looked up my record?  Do you know who I am?"

The agent roared, "Oh, we know about you, all right, all right!  I
didn't when I first wrote you, but--  You seem to have a good
record as a laboratory man, though I don't see that you've produced
anything of the slightest use in medicine.  We had hoped to give
you a chance such as you nor nobody else ever had.  John Edtooth,
the Oklahoma oil magnate, has decided to found a university that
for plant and endowment and individuality will beat anything that's
ever been pulled off in education--biggest gymnasium in the world,
with an ex-New York Giant for baseball coach!  We thought maybe we
might work you in on the bacteriology or the physiology--I guess
you could manage to teach that, too, if you boned up on it.  But
we've been making some inquiries.  From some good friends of ours,
down Winnemac way.  And we find that you're not to be trusted with
a position of real responsibility.  Why, they fired you for general
incompetence!  But now that you've had your lesson--  Do you think
you'd be competent to teach Practical Hygiene in Edtooth
University?"

Gottlieb was so angry that he forgot to speak English, and as all
his cursing was in student German, in a creaky dry voice, the whole
scene was very funny indeed to the cackling bookkeeper and the girl
stenographers.  When he went from that place Max Gottlieb walked
slowly, without purpose, and in his eyes were senile tears.




Chapter 13



No one in the medical world had ever damned more heartily than
Gottlieb the commercialism of certain large pharmaceutical firms,
particularly Dawson T. Hunziker & Co., Inc., of Pittsburgh.  The
Hunziker Company was an old and ethical house which dealt only with
reputable doctors--or practically only with reputable doctors.  It
furnished excellent antitoxins for diphtheria and tetanus, as well
as the purest of official preparations, with the plainest and most
official-looking labels on the swaggeringly modest brown bottles.
Gottlieb had asserted that they produced doubtful vaccines, yet he
returned from Chicago to write to Dawson Hunziker that he was no
longer interested in teaching, and he would be willing to work for
them on half time if he might use their laboratories, on possibly
important research, for the rest of the day.

When the letter had gone he sat mumbling.  He was certainly not
altogether sane.  "Education!  Biggest gymnasium in the world!
Incapable of responsibility.  Teaching I can do no more.  But
Hunziker will laugh at me.  I haf told the truth about him and I
shall haf to--  Dear Gott, what shall I do?"

Into this still frenzy, while his frightened daughters peered at
him from doorways, hope glided.

The telephone rang.  He did not answer it.  On the third irascible
burring he took up the receiver and grumbled, "Yes, yes, vot iss
it?"

A twanging nonchalant voice:  "This M. C. Gottlieb?"

"This is Dr. Gottlieb!"

"Well, I guess you're the party.  Hola wire.  Long distance wants
yuh."

Then, "Professor Gottlieb?  This is Dawson Hunziker speaking.  From
Pittsburgh.  My dear fellow, we should be delighted to have you
join our staff."

"I--  But--"

"I believe you have criticized the pharmaceutical houses--oh, we
read the newspaper clippings very efficiently!--but we feel that
when you come to us and understand the Spirit of the Old Firm
better, you'll be enthusiastic.  I hope, by the way, I'm not
interrupting something."

Thus, over certain hundreds of miles, from the gold and blue
drawing-room of his Sewickley home, Hunziker spoke to Max Gottlieb
sitting in his patched easy chair, and Gottlieb grated with a
forlorn effort at dignity:

"No, it iss all right."

"Well--we shall be glad to offer you five thousand dollars a year,
for a starter, and we shan't worry about the half-time arrangement.
We'll give you all the space and technicians and material you need,
and you just go ahead and ignore us, and work out whatever seems
important to you.  Our only request is that if you do find any
serums which are of real value to the world, we shall have the
privilege of manufacturing them, and if we lose money on 'em, it
doesn't matter.  We like to make money, if we can do it honestly,
but our chief purpose is to serve mankind.  Of course if the serums
pay, we shall be only too delighted to give you a generous
commission.  Now about practical details--"


II


Gottlieb, the placidly virulent hater of religious rites, had a
religious-seeming custom.

Often he knelt by his bed and let his mind run free.  It was very
much like prayer, though certainly there was no formal invocation,
no consciousness of a Supreme Being--other than Max Gottlieb.  This
night, as he knelt, with the wrinkles softening in his drawn face,
he meditated, "I was asinine that I should ever scold the
commercialists!  This salesman fellow, he has his feet on the
ground.  How much more aut'entic the worst counter-jumper than
frightened professors!  Fine dieners!  Freedom!  No teaching of
imbeciles!  Du Heiliger!"

But he had no contract with Dawson Hunziker.

In the medical periodicals the Dawson Hunziker Company published
full-page advertisements, most starchy and refined in type,
announcing that Professor Max Gottlieb, perhaps the most
distinguished immunologist in the world, had joined their staff.

In his Chicago clinic, one Dr. Rouncefield chuckled, "That's what
becomes of these super-highbrows.  Pardon me if I seem to grin."

In the laboratories of Ehrlich and Roux, Bordet and Sir David
Bruce, sorrowing men wailed, "How could old Max have gone over to
that damned pill-peddler?  Why didn't he come to us?  Oh, well, if
he didn't want to--  Voila!  He is dead."

In the village of Wheatsylvania, in North Dakota, a young doctor
protested to his wife, "Of all the people in the world!  I wouldn't
have believed it!  Max Gottlieb falling for those crooks!"

"I don't care!" said his wife.  "If he's gone into business he had
some good reason for it.  I told you, I'd leave you for--"

"Oh, well," sighingly, "give and forgive.  I learned a lot from
Gottlieb and I'm grateful for--  God, Leora, I wish HE hadn't gone
wrong!"

And Max Gottlieb, with his three young and a pale, slow-moving
wife, was arriving at the station in Pittsburgh, tugging a shabby
wicker bag, an immigrant bundle, and a Bond Street dressing-case.
From the train he had stared up at the valiant cliffs, down to the
smoke-tinged splendor of the river, and his heart was young.  Here
was fiery enterprise, not the flat land and flat minds of Winnemac.
At the station-entrance every dingy taxicab seemed radiant to him,
and he marched forth a conqueror.


III


In the Dawson Hunziker building, Gottlieb found such laboratories
as he had never planned, and instead of student assistants he had
an expert who himself had taught bacteriology, as well as three
swift technicians, one of them German-trained.  He was received
with acclaim in the private office of Hunziker, which was
remarkably like a minor cathedral.  Hunziker was bald and business-
like as to skull but tortoise-spectacled and sentimental of eye.
He stood up at his Jacobean desk, gave Gottlieb a Havana cigar, and
told him that they had awaited him pantingly.

In the enormous staff dining-room Gottlieb found scores of
competent young chemists and biologists who treated him with
reverence.  He liked them.  If they talked too much of money--of
how much this new tincture of cinchona ought to sell, and how soon
their salaries would be increased--yet they were free of the
careful pomposities of college instructors.  As a youngster, the
cap-tilted young Max had been a laughing man, and now in gusty
arguments his laughter came back.

His wife seemed better; his daughter Miriam found an excellent
piano teacher; the boy Robert entered college that autumn; they had
a spacious though decrepit house; the relief from the droning and
the annually repeated, inevitable routine of the classroom was
exhilarating; and Gottlieb had never in his life worked so well.
He was unconscious of everything outside of his laboratory and a
few theaters and concert-halls.

Six months passed before he realized that the young technical
experts resented what he considered his jolly thrusts at their
commercialism.  They were tired of his mathematical enthusiasms and
some of them viewed him as an old bore, muttered of him as a Jew.
He was hurt, for he liked to be merry with fellow workers.  He
began to ask questions and to explore the Hunziker building.  He
had seen nothing of it save his laboratory, a corridor or two, the
dining-room, and Hunziker's office.

However abstracted and impractical, Gottlieb would have made an
excellent Sherlock Holmes--if anybody who would have made an
excellent Sherlock Holmes would have been willing to be a
detective.  His mind burned through appearances to actuality.  He
discovered now that the Dawson Hunziker Company was quite all he
had asserted in earlier days.  They did make excellent antitoxins
and ethical preparations, but they were also producing a new
"cancer remedy" manufactured from the orchid, pontifically
recommended and possessing all the value of mud.  And to various
billboard-advertising beauty companies they sold millions of
bottles of a complexion-cream guaranteed to turn a Canadian Indian
guide as lily-fair as the angels.  This treasure cost six cents a
bottle to make and a dollar over the counter, and the name of
Dawson Hunziker was never connected with it.

It was at this time that Gottlieb succeeded in his masterwork after
twenty years of seeking.  He produced antitoxin in the test-tube,
which meant that it would be possible to immunize against certain
diseases without tediously making sera by the inoculation of
animals.  It was a revolution, the revolution, in immunology . . .
if he was right.

He revealed it at a dinner for which Hunziker had captured a
general, a college president, and a pioneer aviator.  It was an
expansive dinner, with admirable hock, the first decent German wine
Gottlieb had drunk in years.  He twirled the slender green glass
affectionately; he came out of his dreams and became excited, gay,
demanding.  They applauded him, and for an hour he was a Great
Scientist.  Of them all, Hunziker was most generous in his praise.
Gottlieb wondered if someone had not tricked this good bald man
into intrigues with the beautifiers.

Hunziker summoned him to the office next day.  Hunziker did his
summoning very well indeed (unless it happened to be merely a
stenographer).  He sent a glossy morning-coated male secretary, who
presented Mr. Hunziker's compliments to the much less glossy Dr.
Gottlieb, and hinted with the delicacy of a lilac bud that if it
was quite altogether convenient, if it would not in the least
interfere with Dr. Gottlieb's experiments, Mr. Hunziker would be
flattered to see him in the office at a quarter after three.

When Gottlieb rambled in, Hunziker motioned the secretary out of
existence and drew up a tall Spanish chair.

"I lay awake half the night thinking about your discovery, Dr.
Gottlieb.  I've been talking to the technical director and sales-
manager and we feel it's the time to strike.  We'll patent your
method of synthesizing antibodies and immediately put them on the
market in large quantities, with a great big advertising campaign--
you know--not circus it, of course--strictly high-class ethical
advertising.  We'll start with anti-diphtheria serum.  By the way,
when you receive your next check you'll find we've raised your
honorarium to seven thousand a year."  Hunziker was a large purring
pussy now, and Gottlieb death-still.  "Need I say, my dear fellow,
that if there's the demand I anticipate, you will have exceedingly
large commissions coming!"

Hunziker leaned back with a manner of "How's that for glory, my
boy?"

Gottlieb spoke nervously:  "I do not approve of patenting
serological processes.  They should be open to all laboratories.
And I am strongly against premature production or even announcement.
I think I am right, but I must check my technique, perhaps improve
it--be SURE.  Then, I should think there should be no objection to
market production, but in ve-ry small quantities and in fair
competition with others, not under patents, as if this was a
dinglebat toy for the Christmas tradings!"

"My dear fellow, I quite sympathize.  Personally I should like
nothing so much as to spend my whole life in just producing one
priceless scientific discovery, without consideration of mere
profit.  But we have our duty toward the stockholders of the Dawson
Hunziker Company to make money for them.  Do you realize that they
have--and many of them are poor widows and orphans--invested their
Little All in our stock, and that we must keep faith?  I am
helpless; I am but their Humble Servant.  And on the other side:  I
think we've treated you rather well, Dr. Gottlieb, and we've given
you complete freedom.  And we intend to go on treating you well!
Why, man, you'll be rich; you'll be one of us!  I don't like to
make any demands, but on this point it's my duty to insist, and I
shall expect you at the earliest possible moment to start
manufacturing--"

Gottlieb was sixty-two.  The defeat at Winnemac had done something
to his courage. . . .  And he had no contract with Hunziker.

He protested shakily, but as he crawled back to his laboratory it
seemed impossible for him to leave this sanctuary and face the
murderous brawling world, and quite as impossible to tolerate a
cheapened and ineffective imitation of his antitoxin.  He began,
that hour, a sordid strategy which his old proud self would have
called inconceivable; he began to equivocate, to put off
announcement and production till he should have "cleared up a few
points," while week on week Hunziker became more threatening.
Meantime he prepared for disaster.  He moved his family to a
smaller house, and gave up every luxury, even smoking.

Among his economies was the reduction of his son's allowance.

Robert was a square-rigged, swart, tempestuous boy, arrogant where
there seemed to be no reason for arrogance, longed for by the
anemic, milky sort of girls, yet ever supercilious to them.  While
his father was alternately proud and amiably sardonic about his own
Jewish blood, the boy conveyed to his classmates in college that he
was from pure and probably noble German stock.  He was welcomed, or
half welcomed, in a motoring, poker-playing, country-club set, and
he had to have more money.  Gottlieb missed twenty dollars from his
desk.  He who ridiculed conventional honor had the honor, as he had
the pride, of a savage old squire.  A new misery stained his
incessant bitterness at having to deceive Hunziker.  He faced
Robert with, "My boy, did you take the money from my desk?"

Few youngsters could have faced that jut of his hawk nose, the red-
veined rage of his sunken eyes.  Robert spluttered, then shouted:

"Yes, I did!  And I've got to have some more!  I've got to get some
clothes and stuff.  It's your fault.  You bring me up to train with
a lot of fellows that have all the cash in the world, and then you
expect me to dress like a hobo!"

"Stealing--"

"Rats!  What's stealing!  You're always making fun of these
preachers that talk about Sin and Truth and Honesty and all those
words that've been used so much they don't mean a darn' thing and--
I don't care!  Daws Hunziker, the old man's son, he told me his dad
said you could be a millionaire, and then you keep us strapped like
this, and Mom sick--  Let me tell you, back in Mohalis Mom used to
slip me a couple of dollars almost every week and--  I'm tired of
it!  If you're going to keep me in rags, I'm going to cut out
college!"

Gottlieb stormed, but there was no force in it.  He did not know,
all the next fortnight, what his son was going to do, what himself
was going to do.

Then, so quietly that not till they had returned from the cemetery
did they realize her passing, his wife died, and the next week his
oldest daughter ran off with a worthless laughing fellow who lived
by gambling.

Gottlieb sat alone.  Over and over he read the Book of Job.  "Truly
the Lord hath smitten me and my house," he whispered.  When Robert
came in, mumbling that he would be good, the old man lifted to him
a blind face, unhearing.  But as he repeated the fables of his
fathers it did not occur to him to believe them, or to stoop in
fear before their God of Wrath--or to gain ease by permitting
Hunziker to defile his discovery.

He arose, in time, and went silently to his laboratory.  His
experiments were as careful as ever, and his assistants saw no
change save that he did not lunch in hall.  He walked blocks away,
to a vile restaurant at which he could save thirty cents a day.


IV


Out of the dimness which obscured the people about him, Miriam
emerged.

She was eighteen, the youngest of his brood, squat, and in no way
comely save for her tender mouth.  She had always been proud of her
father, understanding the mysterious and unreasoning compulsions of
his science, but she had been in awe till now, when he walked
heavily and spoke rarely.  She dropped her piano lessons,
discharged the maid, studied the cook-book, and prepared for him
the fat crisp dishes that he loved.  Her regret was that she had
never learned German, for he dropped now and then into the speech
of his boyhood.

He eyed her, and at length:  "So!  One is with me.  Could you
endure the poverty if I went away--to teach chemistry in a high
school!"

"Yes.  Of course.  Maybe I could play the piano in a movie
theater."

He might not have done it without her loyalty, but when Dawson
Hunziker next paraded into the laboratory, demanding, "Now look
here.  We've fussed long enough.  We got to put your stuff on the
market," then Gottlieb answered, "No.  If you wait till I have done
all I can--maybe one year, probably three--you shall have it.  But
not till I am sure.  No."

Hunziker went off huffily, and Gottlieb prepared for sentence.

Then the card of Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs, Director of the McGurk
Institute of Biology, of New York, was brought to him.

Gottlieb knew of Tubbs.  He had never visited McGurk but he
considered it, next to Rockefeller and McCormick, the soundest and
freest organization for pure scientific research in the country,
and if he had pictured a Heavenly laboratory in which good
scientists might spend eternity in happy and thoroughly impractical
research, he would have devised it in the likeness of McGurk.  He
was mildly pleased that its director should have called on him.

Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs was tremendously whiskered on all visible spots
save his nose and temples and the palms of his hands, short but
passionately whiskered, like a Scotch terrier.  Yet they were not
comic whiskers; they were the whiskers of dignity; and his eyes
were serious, his step an earnest trot, his voice a piping
solemnity.

"Dr. Gottlieb, this is a great pleasure.  I have heard your papers
at the Academy of Sciences but, to my own loss, I have hitherto
failed to have an introduction to you."

Gottlieb tried not to sound embarrassed.

Tubbs looked at the assistants; like a plotter in a political play,
and hinted, "May we have a talk--"

Gottlieb led him to his office, overlooking a vast bustle of side-
tracks, of curving rails and brown freight-cars, and Tubbs urged:

"It has come to our attention, by a curious chance, that you are on
the eve of your most significant discovery.  We all wondered, when
you left academic work, at your decision to enter the commercial
field.  We wished that you had cared to come to us."

"You would have taken me in?  I needn't at all have come here?"

"Naturally!  Now from what we hear, you are not giving your
attention to the commercial side of things, and that tempts us to
wonder whether you could be persuaded to join us at McGurk.  So I
just sprang on a train and ran down here.  We should be delighted
to have you become a member of the institute, and chief of the
Department of Bacteriology and Immunology.  Mr. McGurk and I desire
nothing but the advancement of science.  You would, of course, have
absolute freedom as to what researches you thought it best to
pursue, and I think we could provide as good assistance and
material as would be obtainable anywhere in the world.  In regard
to salary--permit me to be business-like and perhaps blunt, as my
train leaves in one hour--I don't suppose we could equal the
doubtless large emolument which the Hunziker people are able to pay
you, but we can go to ten thousand dollars a year--"

"Oh, my God, do not talk of the money!  I shall be wit' you in New
York one week from today.  You see," said Gottlieb, "I haf no
contract here!"




Chapter 14



All afternoon they drove in the flapping buggy across the long
undulations of the prairie.  To their wandering there was no
barrier, neither lake nor mountain nor factory-bristling city, and
the breeze about them was flowing sunshine.

Martin cried to Leora, "I feel as if all the Zenith dust and
hospital lint were washed out of my lungs.  Dakota.  Real man's
country.  Frontier.  Opportunity.  America!"

From the thick swale the young prairie chickens rose.  As he
watched them sweep across the wheat, his sun-drowsed spirit was
part of the great land, and he was almost freed of the impatience
with which he had started out from Wheatsylvania.

"If you're going driving, don't forget that supper is six o'clock
sharp," Mrs. Tozer had said, smiling to sugar-coat it.

On Main Street, Mr. Tozer waved to them and shouted, "Be back by
six.  Supper at six o'clock sharp."

Bert Tozer ran out from the bank, like a country schoolmaster
skipping from a one-room schoolhouse, and cackled, "Say, you folks
better not forget to be back at six o'clock for supper or the Old
Man'll have a fit.  He'll expect you for supper at six o'clock
sharp, and when he says six o'clock SHARP, he means six o'clock
SHARP, and not five minutes past six!"

"Now that," observed Leora, "is funny, because in my twenty-two
years in Wheatsylvania I remember three different times when supper
was as late as seven minutes after six.  Let's get out of this,
Sandy. . . .  I wonder were we so wise to live with the family and
save money?"

Before they had escaped from the not very extensive limits of
Wheatsylvania they passed Ada Quist, the future Mrs. Bert Tozer,
and through the lazy air they heard her voice slashing:  "Better be
home by six."

Martin would be heroic.  "We'll by golly get back when we're by
golly good and ready!" he said to Leora; but on them both was the
cumulative dread of the fussing voices, beyond every breezy
prospect was the order, "Be back at six sharp"; and they whipped up
to arrive at eleven minutes to six, as Mr. Tozer was returning from
the creamery, full thirty seconds later than usual.

"Glad to see you among us," he said.  "Hustle now and get that
horse in the livery stable.  Supper's at six--sharp!"

Martin survived it sufficiently to sound domestic when he announced
at the supper-table:

"We had a bully drive.  I'm going to like it here.  Well, I've
loafed for a day and a half, and now I've got to get busy.  First
thing is, I must find a location for my office.  What is there
vacant, Father Tozer?"

Mrs. Tozer said brightly, "Oh, I have such a nice idea, Martin.
Why can't we fix up an office for you out in the barn?  It'd be so
handy to the house, for you to get to meals on time, and you could
keep an eye on the house if the girl was out and Ory and I went out
visiting or to the Embroidery Circle."

"In the barn!"

"Why, yes, in the old harness room.  It's partly ceiled, and we
could put in some nice tar paper or even beaver board."

"Mother Tozer, what the dickens do you think I'm planning to do?
I'm not a hired man in a livery stable, or a kid looking for a
place to put his birds' eggs!  I was thinking of opening an office
as a physician!"

Bert made it all easy:  "Yuh, but you aren't much of a physician
yet.  You're just getting your toes in."

"I'm one hell of a good physician!  Excuse me for cussing, Mother
Tozer, but--  Why, nights in the hospital, I've held hundreds of
lives in my hand!  I intend--"

"Look here, Mart," said Bertie.  "As we're putting up the money--I
don't want to be a tightwad but after all, a dollar is a dollar--if
we furnish the dough, we've got to decide the best way to spend
it."

Mr. Tozer looked thoughtful and said helplessly, "That's so.  No
sense taking a risk, with the blame farmers demanding all the money
they can get for their wheat and cream, and then deliberately going
to work and not paying the interest on their loans.  I swear, it
don't hardly pay to invest in mortgages any longer.  No sense
putting on lugs.  Stands to reason you can look at a fellow's sore
throat or prescribe for an ear-ache just as well in a nice simple
little office as in some fool place all fixed up like a Moorhead
saloon.  Mother will see you have a comfortable corner in the barn--"

Leora intruded:  "Look here, Papa.  I want you to lend us one
thousand dollars, outright, to use as we see fit."  The sensation
was immense.  "We'll pay you six per cent--no, we won't; we'll pay
you five; that's enough."

"And mortgages bringing six, seven, and eight!" Bert quavered.

"Five's enough.  And we want our own say, absolute, as to how we
use it--to fit up an office or anything else."

Mr. Tozer began, "That's a foolish way to--"

Bert took it away from him:  "Ory, you're crazy!  I suppose we'll
have to lend you some money, but you'll blame well come to us for
it from time to time, and you'll blame well take our advice--"

Leora rose.  "Either you do what I say, just exactly what I say, or
Mart and I take the first train and go back to Zenith, and I mean
it!  Plenty of places open for him there, with a big salary, so we
won't have to be dependent on anybody!"

There was much conversation, most of which sounded like all the
rest of it.  Once Leora started for the stairs, to go up and pack;
once Martin and she stood waving their napkins as they shook their
fists, the general composition remarkably like the Laocoon.

Leora won.

They settled down to the most solacing fussing.

"Did you bring your trunk up from the depot?" asked Mr. Tozer.

"No sense leaving it there--paying two bits a day storage!" fumed
Bert.

"I got it up this morning," said Martin.

"Oh, yes, Martin had it brought up this morning," agreed Mrs.
Tozer.

"You had it brought?  Didn't you bring it up yourself?" agonized
Mr. Tozer.

"No.  I had the fellow that runs the lumberyard haul it up for me,"
said Martin.

"Well, gosh almighty, you could just as well've put it on a
wheelbarrow and brought it up yourself and saved a quarter!" said
Bert.

"But a doctor has to keep his dignity," said Leora.

"Dignity, rats!  Blame sight more dignified to be seen shoving a
wheelbarrow than smoking them dirty cigarettes all the time!"

"Well, anyway--  Where'd you put it?" asked Mr. Tozer.

"It's up in our room," said Martin.

"Where'd you think we better put it when it's unpacked?  The attic
is awful' full," Mr. Tozer submitted to Mrs. Tozer.

"Oh, I think Martin could get it in there."

"Why couldn't he put it in the barn?"

"Oh, not a nice new trunk like that!"

"What's the matter with the barn?" said Bert.  "It's all nice and
dry.  Seems a shame to waste all that good space in the barn, now
that you've gone and decided he mustn't have his dear little office
there!"

"Bertie," from Leora, "I know what we'll do.  You seem to have the
barn on your brain.  You move your old bank there, and Martin'll
take the bank building for his office."

"That's entirely different--"

"Now there's no sense you two showing off and trying to be smart,"
protested Mr. Tozer.  "Do you ever hear your mother and I scrapping
and fussing like that?  When do you think you'll have your trunk
unpacked, Mart?"  Mr. Tozer could consider barns and he could
consider trunks but his was not a brain to grasp two such
complicated matters at the same time.

"I can get it unpacked tonight, if it makes any difference--"

"Well, I don't suppose it really makes any special difference, but
when you start to DO a thing--"

"Oh, what difference does it make whether he--"

"If he's going to look for an office, instead of moving right into
the barn, he can't take a month of Sundays getting unpacked and--"

"Oh, good Lord, I'll get it done tonight--"

"And I think we can get it in the attic--"

"I tell you it's jam full already--"

"We'll go take a look at it after supper--"

"Well now, I tell you when I tried to get that duck-boat in--"

Martin probably did not scream, but he heard himself screaming.
The free and virile land was leagues away and for years forgotten.


II


To find an office took a fortnight of diplomacy, and of discussion
brightening three meals a day, every day.  (Not that office-finding
was the only thing the Tozers mentioned.  They went thoroughly into
every moment of Martin's day; they commented on his digestion, his
mail, his walks, his shoes that needed cobbling, and whether he had
yet taken them to the farmer-trapper-cobbler, and how much the
cobbling ought to cost, and the presumable theology, politics, and
marital relations of the cobbler.)

Mr. Tozer had from the first known the perfect office.  The
Norbloms lived above their general store, and Mr. Tozer knew that
the Norbloms were thinking of moving.  There was indeed nothing
that was happening or likely to happen in Wheatsylvania which Mr.
Tozer did not know and explain.  Mrs. Norblom was tired of keeping
house, and she wanted to go to Mrs. Beeson's boarding house (to the
front room, on the right as you went along the up-stairs hall, the
room with the plaster walls and the nice little stove that Mrs.
Beeson bought from Otto Krag for seven dollars and thirty-five
cents--no, seven and a quarter it was).

They called on the Norbloms and Mr. Tozer hinted that "it might be
nice for the Doctor to locate over the store, if the Norbloms were
thinking of making any change--"

The Norbloms stared at each other, with long, bleached, cautious,
Scandinavian stares, and grumbled that they "didn't KNOW--of course
it was the finest location in town--"  Mr. Norblom admitted that
if, against all probability, they ever considered moving, they
would probably ask twenty-five dollars a month for the flat,
unfurnished.

Mr. Tozer came out of the international conference as craftily
joyful as any Mr. Secretary Tozer or Lord Tozer in Washington or
London:

"Fine!  Fine!  We made him commit himself!  Twenty-five, he says.
That means, when the time's ripe, we'll offer him eighteen and
close for twenty-one-seventy-five.  If we just handle him careful,
and give him time to go see Mrs. Beeson and fix up about boarding
with her, we'll have him just where we want him!"

"Oh, if the Norbloms can't make up their minds, then let's try
something else," said Martin.  "There's a couple of vacant rooms
behind the Eagle office."

"What?  Go chasing around, after we've given the Norbloms reason to
think we're serious, and make enemies of 'em for life?  Now that
would be a fine way to start building up a practice, wouldn't it?
And I must say I wouldn't blame the Norbloms one bit for getting
wild if you let 'em down like that.  This ain't Zenith, where you
can go yelling around expecting to get things done in two minutes!"

Through a fortnight, while the Norbloms agonized over deciding to
do what they had long ago decided to do, Martin waited, unable to
begin work.  Until he should open a certified and recognizable
office, most of the village did not regard him as a competent
physician but as "that son-in-law of Andy Tozer's."  In the
fortnight he was called only once: for the sick-headache of Miss
Agnes Ingleblad, aunt and housekeeper of Alec Ingleblad the barber.
He was delighted, till Bert Tozer explained:

"Oh, so SHE called you in, eh?  She's always doctorin' around.
There ain't a thing the matter with her, but she's always trying
out the latest stunt.  Last time it was a fellow that come through
here selling pills and liniments out of a Ford, and the time before
that it was a faith-healer, crazy loon up here at Dutchman's Forge,
and then for quite a spell she doctored with an osteopath in
Leopolis--though I tell you there's something to this osteopathy--
they cure a lot of folks that you regular docs can't seem to find
out what's the matter with 'em, don't you think so?"

Martin remarked that he did not think so.

"Oh, you docs!" Bert crowed in his most jocund manner, for Bert
could be very joky and bright.  "You're all alike, especially when
you're just out of school and think you know it all.  You can't see
any good in chiropractic or electric belts or bone-setters or
anything, because they take so many good dollars away from you."

Then behold the Dr. Martin Arrowsmith who had once infuriated Angus
Duer and Irving Watters by his sarcasm on medical standards
upholding to a lewdly grinning Bert Tozer the benevolence and
scientific knowledge of all doctors; proclaiming that no medicine
had ever (at least by any Winnemac graduate) been prescribed in
vain nor any operation needlessly performed.

He saw a good deal of Bert now.  He sat about the bank, hoping to
be called on a case, his fingers itching for bandages.  Ada Quist
came in with frequency and Bert laid aside his figuring to be coy
with her:

"You got to be careful what you even think about, when the doc is
here, Ade.  He's been telling me what a whale of a lot of neurology
and all that mind-reading stuff he knows.  How about it, Mart?  I'm
getting so scared that I've changed the combination on the safe."

"Heh!" said Ada.  "He may fool some folks but he can't fool me.
Anybody can learn things in books, but when it comes to practicing
'em--  Let me tell you, Mart, if you ever have one-tenth of the
savvy that old Dr. Winter of Leopolis has, you'll live longer than
I expect!"

Together they pointed out that for a person who felt his Zenith
training had made him so "gosh-awful smart that he sticks up his
nose at us poor hicks of dirt-farmers," Martin's scarf was rather
badly tied.

All of his own wit and some of Ada's Bert repeated at the supper
table.

"You oughtn't to ride the boy so hard.  Still, that was pretty cute
about the necktie--I guess Mart does think he's some punkins,"
chuckled Mr. Tozer.

Leora took Martin aside after supper.  "Darlin', can you stand it?
We'll have our own house, soon as we can.  Or shall we vamoose?"

"I'm by golly going to stand it!"

"Um.  Maybe.  Dear, when you hit Bertie, do be careful--they'll
hang you."

He ambled to the front porch.  He determined to view the rooms
behind the Eagle office.  Without a retreat in which to be safe
from Bert he could not endure another week.  He could not wait for
the Norbloms to make up their minds, though they had become to him
dread and eternal figures whose enmity would crush him; prodigious
gods shadowing this Wheatsylvania which was the only perceptible
world.

He was aware, in the late sad light, that a man was tramping the
plank walk before the house, hesitating and peering at him.  The
man was one Wise, a Russian Jew known to the village as "Wise the
Polack."  In his shack near the railroad he sold silver stock and
motor-factory stock, bought and sold farmlands and horses and
muskrat hides.  He called out, "That you, Doc?"

"Yup!"

Martin was excited.  A patient!

"Say, I wish you'd walk down a ways with me.  Couple things I'd
like to talk to you about.  Or say, come on over to my place and
sample some new cigars I've got."  He emphasized the word "cigars."
North Dakota was, like Mohalis, theoretically dry.

Martin was pleased.  He had been sober and industrious so long now!

Wise's shack was a one-story structure, not badly built, half a
block from Main Street, with nothing but the railroad track between
it and open wheat country.  It was lined with pine, pleasant-
smelling under the stench of old pipe-smoke.  Wise winked--he was a
confidential, untrustworthy wisp of a man--and murmured, "Think you
could stand a little jolt of first-class Kentucky bourbon?"

"Well, I wouldn't get violent about it."

Wise pulled down the sleazy window-shades and from a warped drawer
of his desk brought up a bottle out of which they both drank,
wiping the mouth of the bottle with circling palms.  Then Wise,
abruptly:

"Look here, Doc.  You're not like these hicks; you understand that
sometimes a fellow gets mixed up in crooked business he didn't
intend to.  Well, make a long story short, I guess I've sold too
much mining stock, and they'll be coming down on me.  I've got to
be moving--curse it--hoped I could stay settled for couple of
years, this time.  Well, I hear you're looking for an office.  This
place would be ideal.  Ideal!  Two rooms at the back besides this
one.  I'll rent it to you, furniture and the whole shooting-match,
for fifteen dollars a month, if you'll pay me one year in advance.
Oh, this ain't phony.  Your brother-in-law knows all about my
ownership."

Martin tried to be very business-like.  Was he not a young doctor
who would soon be investing money, one of the most Substantial
Citizens in Wheatsylvania?  He returned home, and under the parlor
lamp, with its green daisies on pink glass, the Tozers listened
acutely, Bert stooping forward with open mouth.

"You'd be safe renting it for a year, but that ain't the point,"
said Bert.

"It certainly isn't!  Antagonize the Norbloms, now that they've
almost made up their minds to let you have their place?  Make me a
fool, after all the trouble I've taken?" groaned Mr. Tozer.

They went over it and over it till almost ten o'clock, but Martin
was resolute, and the next day he rented Wise's shack.

For the first time in his life he had a place utterly his own, his
and Leora's.

In his pride of possession this was the most lordly building on
earth, and every rock and weed and doorknob was peculiar and
lovely.  At sunset he sat on the back stoop (a very interesting and
not too broken soap-box) and from the flamboyant horizon the open
country flowed across the thin band of the railroad to his feet.
Suddenly Leora was beside him, her arm round his neck, and he
hymned all the glory of their future:

"Know what I found in the kitchen here?  A dandy old auger, hardly
rusty a bit, and I can take a box and make a test-tube rack . . .
of my own!"




Chapter 15



With none of the profane observations on "medical peddlers" which
had annoyed Digamma Pi, Martin studied the catalogue of the New
Idea Instrument and Furniture Company, of Jersey City.  It was a
handsome thing.  On the glossy green cover, in red and black, were
the portraits of the president, a round quippish man who loved all
young physicians; the general manager, a cadaverous scholarly man
who surely gave all his laborious nights and days to the
advancement of science; and the vice-president, Martin's former
preceptor, Dr. Roscoe Geake, who had a lively, eye-glassed,
forward-looking modernity all his own.  The cover also contained in
surprisingly small space, a quantity of poetic prose, and the
inspiring promise:


Doctor, don't be buffaloed by the unenterprising.  No reason why
YOU should lack the equipment which impresses patients, makes
practice easy, and brings honor and riches.  All the high-class
supplies which distinguish the Leaders of the Profession from the
Dubs are within YOUR reach right NOW by the famous New Idea
Financial System:  "Just a little down and the rest FREE--out of
the increased earnings which New Idea apparatus will bring you!"


Above, in a border of laurel wreaths and Ionic capitals, was the
challenge:


Sing not the glory of soldiers or explorers or statesmen for who
can touch the doctor--wise, heroic, uncontaminated by common greed.
Gentlemen, we salute you humbly and herewith offer you the most up-
to-the-jiffy catalogue ever presented by any surgical supply house.


The back cover, though it was less glorious with green and red, was
equally arousing.  It presented illustrations of the Bindledorf
Tonsillectomy Outfit and of an electric cabinet, with the demand:


Doctor, are you sending your patients off to specialists for tonsil
removal or to sanitoriums for electric, etc., treatment?  If, so,
you are losing the chance to show yourself one of the distinguished
powers in the domain of medical advancement in your locality, and
losing a lot of big fees.  Don't you WANT to be a high-class
practitioner?  Here's the Open Door.

The Bindledorf Outfit is not only useful but exquisitely beautiful,
adorns and gives class to any office.  We guarantee that by the
installation of a Bindledorf Outfit and a New Idea Panaceatic
Electro-Therapeutic Cabinet (see details on pp. 34 and 97) you can
increase your income from a thousand to ten thousand annually and
please patients more than by the most painstaking plugging.

When the Great Call sounds, Doctor, and it's time for you to face
your reward, will you be satisfied by a big Masonic funeral and
tributes from Grateful Patients if you have failed to lay up
provision for the kiddies, and faithful wife who has shared your
tribulations?

You may drive through blizzard and August heat, and go down into
the purple-shadowed vale of sorrow and wrestle with the ebon-
cloaked Powers of Darkness for the lives of your patients, but that
heroism is incomplete without Modern Progress, to be obtained by
the use of a Bindledorf Tonsillectomy Outfit and the New Idea
Panaceatic Cabinet, to be obtained on small payment down, rest on
easiest terms known in history of medicine!


II


This poetry of passion Martin neglected, for his opinion of poetry
was like his opinion of electric cabinets, but excitedly he ordered
a steel stand, a sterilizer, flasks, test-tubes, and a white-
enameled mechanism with enchanting levers and gears which
transformed it from examining-chair to operating-table.  He yearned
over the picture of a centrifuge while Leora was admiring the
"stunning seven-piece Reception Room fumed oak set, upholstered in
genuine Barcelona Longware Leatherette, will give your office the
class and distinction of any high-grade New York specialist's."

"Aw, let 'em sit on plain chairs," Martin grunted.

In the attic Mrs. Tozer found enough seedy chairs for the
reception-room, and an ancient bookcase which, when Leora had lined
it with pink fringed paper, became a noble instrument-cabinet.
Till the examining-chair should arrive, Martin would use Wise's
lumpy couch, and Leora busily covered it with white oilcloth.
Behind the front room of the tiny office-building were two
cubicles, formerly bedroom and kitchen.  Martin made them into
consultation-room and laboratory.  Whistling, he sawed out racks
for the glassware and turned the oven of a discarded kerosene stove
into a hot-air oven for sterilizing glassware.

"But understand, Lee, I'm not going to go monkeying with any
scientific research.  I'm through with all that."

Leora smiled innocently.  While he worked she sat outside in the
long wild grass, sniffing the prairie breeze, her hands about her
ankles, but every quarter-hour she had to come in and admire.

Mr. Tozer brought home a package at suppertime.  The family opened
it, babbling.  After supper Martin and Leora hastened with the new
treasure to the office and nailed it in place.  It was a plate-
glass sign; on it in gold letters, "M. Arrowsinith, M.D."  They
looked up, arms about each other, squealing softly, and in
reverence he grunted, "There--by--jiminy!"

They sat on the back stoop, exulting in freedom from Tozers.  Along
the railroad bumped a freight train with a cheerful clanking.  The
fireman waved to them from the engine, a brakeman from the platform
of the red caboose.  After the train there was silence but for the
crickets and a distant frog.

"I've never been so happy," he murmured.


III


He had brought from Zenith his own Ochsner surgical case.  As he
laid out the instruments he admired the thin, sharp, shining
bistoury, the strong tenotome, the delicate curved needles.  With
them was a dental forceps.  Dad Silva had warned his classes,
"Don't forget the country doctor often has to be not only physician
but dentist, yes, and priest, divorce lawyer, blacksmith,
chauffeur, and road engineer, and if you are too lily-handed for
those trades, don't get out of sight of a trolley line and a beauty
parlor."  And the first patient whom Martin had in the new office,
the second patient in Wheatsylvania, was Nils Krag, the carpenter,
roaring with an ulcerated tooth.  This was a week before the glass
sign was up, and Martin rejoiced to Leora, "Begun already!  You'll
see 'em tumbling in now."

They did not see them tumbling in.  For ten days Martin tinkered at
his hot-air oven or sat at his desk, reading and trying to look
busy.  His first joy passed into fretfulness, and he could have
yelped at the stillness, the inactivity.

Late one afternoon, when he was in a melancholy way preparing to go
home, into the office stamped a grizzled Swedish farmer who
grumbled, "Doc, I got a fish-hook caught in my thumb and its all
swole."  To Arrowsmith, intern in Zenith General Hospital with its
out-patient clinic treating hundreds a day, the dressing of a hand
had been less important than borrowing a match, but to Dr.
Arrowsmith of Wheatsylvania it was a hectic operation, and the
farmer a person remarkable and very charming.  Martin shook his
left hand violently and burbled, "Now if there's anything, you just
'phone me--you just 'phone me."

There had been, he felt, a rush of admiring patients sufficient to
justify them in the one thing Leora and he longed to do, the thing
about which they whispered at night: the purchase of a motor car
for his country calls.

They had seen the car at Frazier's store.

It was a Ford, five years old, with torn upholstery, a gummy motor,
and springs made by a blacksmith who had never made springs before.
Next to the chugging of the gas engine at the creamery, the most
familiar sound in Wheatsylvania was Frazier's closing the door of
his Ford.  He banged it flatly at the store, and usually he had to
shut it thrice again before he reached home.

But to Martin and Leora, when they had tremblingly bought the car
and three new tires and a horn, it was the most impressive vehicle
on earth.  It was their own; they could go when and where they
wished.

During his summer at a Canadian hotel Martin had learned to drive
the Ford station wagon, but it was Leora's first venture.  Bert had
given her so many directions that she had refused to drive the
family Overland.  When she first sat at the steering wheel, when
she moved the hand-throttle with her little finger and felt in her
own hands all this power, sorcery enabling her to go as fast as she
might desire (within distinct limits), she transcended human
strength, she felt that she could fly like the wild goose--and then
in a stretch of sand she killed the engine.

Martin became the demon driver of the village.  To ride with him
was to sit holding your hat, your eyes closed, waiting for death.
Apparently he accelerated for corners, to make them more
interesting.  The sight of anything on the road ahead, from another
motor to a yellow pup, stirred in him a frenzy which could be
stilled only by going up and passing it.  The village adored, "The
Young Doc is quite some driver, all right."  They waited, with
amiable interest, to hear that he had been killed.  It is possible
that half of the first dozen patients who drifted into his office
came because of awe at his driving . . . the rest because there was
nothing serious the matter, and he was nearer than Dr. Hesselink at
Groningen.


IV


With his first admirers he developed his first enemies.

When he met the Norbloms on the street (and in Wheatsylvania it is
difficult not to meet everyone on the street every day), they
glared.  Then he antagonized Pete Yeska.

Pete conducted what he called a "drug store," devoted to the sale
of candy, soda water, patent medicines, fly paper, magazines,
washing-machines, and Ford accessories, yet Pete would have starved
if he had not been postmaster also.  He alleged that he was a
licensed pharmacist but he so mangled prescriptions that Martin
burst into the store and addressed him piously.

"You young docs make me sick," said Pete.  "I was putting up
prescriptions when you was in the cradle.  The old doc that used to
be here sent everything to me.  My way o' doing things suits me,
and I don't figure on changing it for you or any other half-baked
young string-bean."

Thereafter Martin had to purchase drugs from St. Paul, over-crowd
his tiny laboratory, and prepare his own pills and ointments,
looking in a homesick way at the rarely used test-tubes and the
dust gathering on the bell glass of his microscope, while Pete
Yeska joined with the Norbloms in Whispering, "This new doc here
ain't any good.  You better stick to Hesselink."


V


So blank, so idle, had been the week that when he heard the
telephone at the Tozers', at three in the morning, he rushed to it
as though he were awaiting a love message.

A hoarse and shaky voice:  "I want to speak to the doctor."

"Yuh--yuh--  'S the doctor speaking."

"This is Henry Novak, four miles northeast, on the Leopolis road.
My little girl, Mary, she has a terrible sore throat.  I think
maybe it is croup and she look awful and--  Could you come right
away?"

"You bet.  Be right there."

Four miles--he would do it in eight minutes.

He dressed swiftly, dragging his worn brown tie together, while
Leora beamed over the first night call.  He furiously cranked the
Ford, banged and clattered past the station and into the wheat
prairie.  When he had gone six miles by the speedometer, slackening
at each rural box to look for the owner's name, he realized that he
was lost.  He ran into a farm driveway and stopped under the
willows, his headlight on a heap of dented milk-cans, broken
harvester wheels, cord-wood, and bamboo fishing-poles.  From the
barn dashed a woolly anomalous dog, barking viciously, leaping up
at the car.

A frowsy head protruded from a ground-floor window.  "What you
want?" screamed a Scandinavian voice.

"This is The Doctor.  Where does Henry Novak live?"

"Oh!  The Doctor!  Dr. Hesselink?"

"No!  Dr. Arrowsmith."

"Oh.  Dr. Arrowsmith.  From Wheatsylvania?  Um.  Well, you went
right near his place.  You yoost turn back one mile and turn to the
right by the brick schoolhouse, and it's about forty rods up the
road--the house with a cement silo.  Somebody sick by Henry's?"

"Yuh--yuh--girl's got croup--thanks--"

"Yoost keep to the right.  You can't miss it."  Probably no one who
has listened to the dire "you can't miss it" has ever failed to
miss it.

Martin swung the Ford about, grazing a slashed chopping block; he
rattled up the road, took the corner that side of the schoolhouse
instead of this, ran half a mile along a boggy trail between
pastures, and stopped at a farmhouse.  In the surprising fall of
silence, cows were to be heard feeding, and a white horse, startled
in the darkness, raised its head to wonder at him.  He had to
arouse the house with wild squawkings of his horn, and an irate
farmer who bellowed, "Who's there?  I've got a shotgun!" sent him
back to the country road.

It was forty minutes from the time of the telephone call when he
rushed into a furrowed driveway and saw on the doorstep, against
the lamplight, a stooped man who called, "The Doctor?  This is
Novak."

He found the child in a newly finished bedroom of white plastered
walls and pale varnished pine.  Only an iron bed, a straight chair,
a chromo of St. Anne, and a shadeless hand-lamp on a rickety stand
broke the staring shininess of the apartment, a recent extension of
the farmhouse.  A heavy-shouldered woman was kneeling by the bed.
As she lifted her wet red face, Novak urged:

"Don't cry now; he's here!"  And to Martin:  "The little one is
pretty bad but we done all we could for her.  Last night and
tonight we steam her throat, and we put her here in our own
bedroom!"

Mary was a child of seven or eight.  Martin found her lips and
finger-tips blue, but in her face no flush.  In the effort to expel
her breath she writhed into terrifying knots, then coughed up
saliva dotted with grayish specks.  Martin worried as he took out
his clinical thermometer and gave it a professional-looking shake.

It was, he decided, laryngeal croup or diphtheria.  Probably
diphtheria.  No time now for bacteriological examination, for
cultures and leisurely precision.  Silva the healer bulked in the
room, crowding out Gottlieb the inhuman perfectionist.  Martin
leaned nervously over the child on the tousled bed, absentmindedly
trying her pulse again and again.  He felt helpless without the
equipment of Zenith General, its nurses and Angus Duers sure
advice.  He had a sudden respect for the lone country doctor.

He had to make a decision, irrevocable, perhaps perilous.  He would
use diphtheria antitoxin.  But certainly he could not obtain it
from Pete Yeska's in Wheatsylvania.

Leopolis?

"Hustle up and get me Blassner, the druggist at Leopolis, on the
'phone," he said to Novak, as calmly as he could contrive.  He
pictured Blassner driving through the night, respectfully bringing
the antitoxin to The Doctor.  While Novak bellowed into the farm-
line telephone in the dining-room, Martin waited--waited--staring
at the child; Mrs. Novak waited for him to do miracles; the child's
tossing and hoarse gasping became horrible; and the glaring walls,
the glaring lines of pale yellow woodwork, hypnotized him into
sleepiness.  It was too late for anything short of antitoxin or
tracheotomy.  Should he operate; cut into the wind-pipe that she
might breathe?  He stood and worried; he drowned in sleepiness and
shook himself awake.  He had to do something, with the mother
kneeling there, gaping at him, beginning to look doubtful.

"Get some hot cloths--towels, napkins--and keep 'em around her
neck.  I wish to God he'd get that telephone call!" he fretted.

As Mrs. Novak, padding on thick slippered feet, brought in the hot
cloths, Novak appeared with a blank "Nobody sleeping at the drug
store, and Blassner's house-line is out of order."

"Then listen.  I'm afraid this may be serious.  I've got to have
antitoxin.  Going to drive t' Leopolis and get it.  You keep up
these hot applications and--  Wish we had an atomizer.  And room
ought to be moister.  Got 'n alcohol stove?  Keep some water
boiling in here.  No use of medicine.  B' right back."

He drove the twenty-four miles to Leopolis in thirty-seven minutes.
Not once did he slow down for a cross-road.  He defied the curves,
the roots thrusting out into the road, though always one dark spot
in his mind feared a blow-out and a swerve.  The speed, the casting
away of all caution, wrought in him a high exultation, and it was
blessed to be in the cool air and alone, after the strain of Mrs.
Novak's watching.  In his mind all the while was the page in Osler
regarding diphtheria, the very picture of the words:  "In severe
cases the first dose should be from 8,000--"  No.  Oh, yes:  "--
from 10,000 to 15,000 units."

He regained confidence.  He thanked the god of science for
antitoxin and for the gas motor.  It was, he decided, a Race with
Death.

"I'm going to do it--going to pull it off and save that poor kid!"
he rejoiced.

He approached a grade crossing and hurled toward it, ignoring
possible trains.  He was aware of a devouring whistle, saw sliding
light on the rails, and brought up sharp.  Past him, ten feet from
his front wheels, flung the Seattle Express like a flying volcano.
The fireman was stoking, and even in the thin clearness of coming
dawn the glow from the fire-box was appalling on the under side of
the rolling smoke.  Instantly the apparition was gone and Martin
sat trembling, hands trembling on the little steering-wheel, foot
trembling like St. Vitus's dance on the brake.  "That was an awful'
close thing!" he muttered, and thought of a widowed Leora,
abandoned to Tozers.  But the vision of the Novak child, struggling
for each terrible breath, overrode all else.  "Hell!  I've killed
the engine!" he groaned.  He vaulted over the side, cranked the
car, and dashed into Leopolis.

To Crynssen County, Leopolis with its four thousand people was a
metropolis, but in the pinched stillness of the dawn it was a tiny
graveyard: Main Street a sandy expanse, the low shops desolate as
huts.  He found one place astir; in the bleak office of the Dakota
Hotel the night clerk was playing poker with the 'bus-driver and
the town policeman.

They wondered at his hysterical entrance.

"Dr. Arrowsmith, from Wheatsylvania.  Kid dying from diphtheria.
Where's Blassner live?  Jump in my car and show me."

The constable was a lanky old man, his vest swinging open over a
collarless shirt, his trousers in folds, his eyes resolute.  He
guided Martin to the home of the druggist, he kicked the door,
then, standing with his lean and bristly visage upraised in the
cold early light, he bawled, "Ed!  Hey, you, Ed!  Come out of it!"

Ed Blassner grumbled from the up-stairs window.  To him, death and
furious doctors had small novelty.  While he drew on his trousers
and coat he was to be heard discoursing to his drowsy wife on the
woe of druggists and the desirability of moving to Los Angeles and
going into real estate.  But he did have diphtheria antitoxin in
his shop, and sixteen minutes after Martin's escape from being
killed by a train he was speeding to Henry Novak's.


VI


The child was still alive when he came brusquely into the house

All the way back he had seen her dead and stiff.  He grunted "Thank
God!" and angrily called for hot water.  He was no longer the
embarrassed cub doctor but the wise and heroic physician who had
won the Race with Death, and in the Peasant eyes of Mrs. Novak, in
Henry's nervous obedience, he read his power.

Swiftly, smoothly, he made intravenous injection of the antitoxin,
and stood expectant.

The child's breathing did not at first vary, as she choked in the
labor of expelling her breath.  There was a gurgle, a struggle in
which her face blackened, and she was still.  Martin peered,
incredulous.  Slowly the Novaks began to glower, shaky hands at
their lips.  Slowly they knew the child was gone.

In the hospital, death had become indifferent and natural to
Martin.  He had said to Angus, he had heard nurses say one to
another, quite cheerfully, "Well, fifty-seven has just passed out."
Now he raged with desire to do the impossible.  She COULDN'T be
dead.  He'd do something--  All the while he was groaning, "I
should've operated--I should have."  So insistent was the thought
that for a time he did not realize that Mrs. Novak was clamoring,
"She is dead?  Dead?"

He nodded, afraid to look at the woman.

"You killed her, with that needle thing!  And not even tell us, so
we could call the priest!"

He crawled past her lamentations and the man's sorrow and drove
home, empty of heart.

"I shall never practice medicine again," he reflected.

"I'm through," he said to Leora.  "I'm no good.  I should of
operated.  I can't face people, when they know about it.  I'm
through.  I'll go get a lab job--Dawson Hunziker or some place."

Salutary was the tartness with which she protested, "You're the
most conceited man that ever lived!  Do you think you're the only
doctor that ever lost a patient?  I know you did everything you
could."  But he went about next day torturing himself, the more
tortured when Mr. Tozer whined at supper, "Henry Novak and his
woman was in town today.  They say you ought to have saved their
girl.  Why didn't you give your mind to it and manage to cure her
somehow?  Ought to tried.  Kind of too bad, because the Novaks have
a lot of influence with all these Pole and Hunky farmers."

After a night when he was too tired to sleep, Martin suddenly drove
to Leopolis.

From the Tozers he had heard almost religious praise of Dr. Adam
Winter of Leopolis, a man of nearly seventy, the pioneer physician
of Crynssen County, and to this sage he was fleeing.  As he drove
he mocked furiously his melodramatic Race with Death, and he came
wearily into the dust-whirling Main Street.  Dr. Winter's office
was above a grocery, in a long "block" of bright red brick stores
with an Egyptian cornice--of tin.  The darkness of the broad
hallway was soothing after the prairie heat and incandescence.
Martin had to wait till three respectful patients had been received
by Dr. Winter, a hoary man with a sympathetic bass voice, before he
was admitted to the consultation-room.

The examining-chair was of doubtful superiority to that once used
by Doc Vickerson of Elk Mills, and sterilizing was apparently done
in a wash-bowl, but in a corner was an electric therapeutic cabinet
with more electrodes and pads than Martin had ever seen.

He told the story of the Novaks, and Winter cried, "Why, Doctor,
you did everything you could have and more too.  Only thing is,
next time, in a crucial case, you better call some older doctor in
consultation--not that you need his advice, but it makes a hit with
the family, it divides the responsibility, and keeps 'em from going
around criticizing.  I, uh, I frequently have the honor of being
called by some of my younger colleagues.  Just wait.  I'll 'phone
the editor of the Gazette and give him an item about the case."

When he had telephoned, Dr. Winter shook hands ardently.  He
indicated his electric cabinet.  "Got one of those things yet?
Ought to, my boy.  Don't know as I use it very often, except with
the cranks that haven't anything the matter with 'em, but say, it
would surprise you how it impresses folks.  Well, Doctor, welcome
to Crynssen County.  Married?  Won't you and your wife come take
dinner with us some Sunday noon?  Mrs. Winter will be real pleased
to meet you.  And if I ever can be of service to you in a
consultation--I only charge a very little more than my regular fee,
and it looks so well, talking the case over with an older man."

Driving home, Martin fell into vain and wicked boasting:

"You bet I'll stick to it!  At worst, I'll never be as bad as that
snuffling old fee-splitter!"

Two weeks after, the Wheatsylvania Eagle, a smeary four-page rag,
reported:


Our enterprising contemporary, the Leopolis Gazette, had as follows
last week to say of one of our townsmen who we recently welcomed to
our midst.

"Dr. M. Arrowsmith of Wheatsylvania is being congratulated, we are
informed by our valued pioneer local physician, Dr. Adam Winter, by
the medical fraternity all through the Pony River Valley, there
being no occupation or profession more unselfishly appreciative of
each other's virtues than the medical gentlemen, on the courage and
enterprise he recently displayed in addition to his scientific
skill.

"Being called to attend the little daughter of Henry Norwalk of
near Delft the well-known farmer and finding the little one near
death with diphtheria he made a desperate attempt to save it by
himself bringing antitoxin from Blassner our ever popular druggist,
who had on hand a full and fresh supply.  He drove out and back in
his gasoline chariot, making the total distance of 48 miles in 79
minutes.

Fortunately our ever alert policeman, Joe Colby, was on the job and
helped Dr. Arrowsmith find Mr. Blassner's bungalow on Red River
Avenue and this gentleman rose from bed and hastened to supply the
doctor with the needed article but unfortunately the child was
already too low to be saved but it is by such incidents of pluck
and quick thinking as well as knowledge which make the medical
profession one of our greatest blessings."


Two hours after this was published, Miss Agnes Ingleblad came in
for another discussion of her non-existent ailments, and two days
later Henry Novak appeared, saying proudly:

"Well, Doc, we all done what we could for the poor little girl, but
I guess I waited too long calling you.  The woman is awful' cut up.
She and I was reading that piece in the Eagle about it.  We showed
it to the priest.  Say, Doc, I wish you'd take a look at my foot.
I got kind of a rheumatic pain in the ankle."




Chapter 16



When he had practiced medicine in Wheatsylvania for one year,
Martin was an inconspicuous but not discouraged country doctor.  In
summer Leora and he drove to the Pony River for picnic suppers and
a swim, very noisy, splashing, and immodest; through autumn he went
duck-hunting with Bert Tozer, who became nearly tolerable when he
stood at sunset on a pass between two slews; and with winter
isolating the village in a sun-blank desert of snow, they had
sleigh-rides, card-parties, "sociables" at the churches.

When Martin's flock turned to him for help, their need and their
patient obedience made them beautiful.  Once or twice he lost his
temper with jovial villagers who bountifully explained to him that
he was less aged than he might have been; once or twice he drank
too much whisky at poker parties in the back room of the Co-
operative Store; but he was known as reliable, skillful, and
honest--and on the whole he was rather less distinguished than Alec
Ingleblad the barber, less prosperous than Nils Krag the carpenter,
and less interesting to his neighbors than the Finnish garageman.

Then one accident and one mistake made him famous for full twelve
miles about.

He had gone fishing, in the spring.  As he passed a farmhouse a
woman ran out shrieking that her baby had swallowed a thimble and
was choking to death.  Martin had for surgical kit a large jack-
knife.  He sharpened it on the farmer's oilstone, sterilized it in
the tea-kettle, operated on the baby's throat, and saved its life.

Every newspaper in the Pony River Valley had a paragraph, and
before this sensation was over he cured Miss Agnes Ingleblad of her
desire to be cured.

She had achieved cold hands and a slow circulation, and he was
called at midnight.  He was soggily sleepy, after two country
drives on muddy roads, and in his torpor he gave her an overdose of
strychnin, which so shocked and stimulated her that she decided to
be well.  It was so violent a change that it made her more
interesting than being an invalid--people had of late taken
remarkably small pleasure in her symptoms.  She went about praising
Martin, and all the world said, "I hear this Doc Arrowsmith is the
only fellow Agnes ever doctored with that's done her a mite of
good."

He gathered a practice small, sound, and in no way remarkable.
Leora and he moved from the Tozers' to a cottage of their own, with
a parlor-dining-room which displayed a nickeled stove on bright,
new, pleasant-smelling linoleum, and a golden-oak sideboard with a
souvenir match-holder from Lake Minnetonka.  He bought a small
Roentgen ray outfit; and he was made a director of the Tozer bank.
He became too busy to long for his days of scientific research,
which had never existed, and Leora sighed:

"It's fierce, being married.  I did expect I'd have to follow you
out on the road and be a hobo, but I never expected to be a Pillar
of the Community.  Well, I'm too lazy to look up a new husband.
Only I warn you: when you become the Sunday School superintendent,
you needn't expect me to play the organ and smile at the cute jokes
you make about Willy's not learning his Golden Text."


II


So did Martin stumble into respectability.

In the autumn of 1912, when Mr. Debs, Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Wilson,
and Mr. Taft were campaigning for the presidency, when Martin
Arrowsmith had lived in Wheatsylvania for a year and a half, Bert
Tozer became a Prominent Booster.  He returned from the state
convention of the Modern Woodmen of America with notions.  Several
towns had sent boosting delegations to the convention, and the
village of Groningen had turned out a motor procession of five
cars, each with an enormous pennant, "Groningen for White Men and
Black Dirt."

Bert came back clamoring that every motor in town must carry a
Wheatsylvania pennant.  He had bought thirty of them and they were
on sale at the bank at seventy-five cents apiece.  This, Bert
explained to everyone who came into the bank, was exactly cost-
price, which was within eleven cents of the truth.  He came
galloping at Martin, demanding that he be the first to display a
pennant.

"I don't want one of those fool things flopping from my 'bus,"
protested Martin.  "What's the idea, anyway?"

"What's the IDEA?  To advertise your own town, of course!"

"What is there to advertise?  Do you think you're going to make
strangers believe Wheatsylvania is a metropolis like New York or
Jimtown by hanging a dusty rag behind a secondhand tin Lizzie?"

"You never did have any patriotism!  Let me tell you, Mart, if you
don't put on a banner I'll see to it that everybody in town notices
it!"

While the other rickety cars of the village announced to the world,
or at least to several square miles of the world, that
Wheatsylvania was the "Wonder Town of Central N. D.," Martin's
clattering Ford went bare; and when his enemy Norblom remarked, "I
like to see a fellow have some public spirit and appreciate the
place he gets his money outa," the citizenry nodded and spat, and
began to question Martin's fame as a worker of miracles.


III


He had intimates--the barber, the editor of the Eagle, the
garageman--to whom he talked comfortably of hunting and the crops,
and with whom he played poker.  Perhaps he was too intimate with
them.  It was the theory of Crynssen County that it was quite all
right for a young professional man to take a timely drink providing
he kept it secret and made up for it by yearning over the clergy of
the neighborhood.  But with the clergy Martin was brief, and his
drinking and poker he never concealed.

If he was bored by the United Brethren minister's discourse on
doctrine, on the wickedness of movies, and the scandalous pay of
pastors, it was not at all because he was a distant and
supersensitive young man but because he found more savor in the
garageman's salty remarks on the art of remembering to ante in
poker.

Through all the state there were celebrated poker players, rustic-
looking men with stolid faces, men who sat in shirtsleeves, chewing
tobacco; men whose longest remark was "By me," and who delighted to
plunder the gilded and condescending traveling salesmen.  When
there was news of a "big game on," the county sports dropped in
silently and went to work--the sewing-machine agent from Leopolis,
the undertaker from Vanderheide's Grove, the bootlegger from St.
Luke, the red fat man from Melody who had no known profession.

Once (still do men tell of it gratefully, up and down the Valley),
they played for seventy-two unbroken hours, in the office of the
Wheatsylvania garage.  It had been a livery-stable; it was littered
with robes and long whips, and the smell of horses mingled with the
reek of gasoline.

The players came and went, and sometimes they slept on the floor
for an hour or two, but they were never less than four in the game.
The stink of cheap feeble cigarettes and cheap powerful cigars
hovered about the table like a malign spirit; the floor was
scattered with stubs, matches, old cards, and whisky bottles.
Among the warriors were Martin, Alec Ingleblad the barber, and a
highway engineer, all of them stripped to flannel undershirts, not
moving for hour on hour, ruffling their cards, eyes squinting and
vacant.

When Bert Tozer heard of the affair, he feared for the good fame of
Wheatsylvania, and to everyone he gossiped about Martin's evil ways
and his own patience.  Thus it happened that while Martin was at
the height of his prosperity and credit as a physician, along the
Pony River Valley sinuated the whispers that he was a gambler, that
he was a "drinking man," that he never went to church; and all the
godly enjoyed mourning, "Too bad to see a decent young man like
that going to the dogs."

Martin was as impatient as he was stubborn.  He resented the well-
meant greetings:  "You ought to leave a little hooch for the rest
of us to drink, Doc," or "I s'pose you're too busy playing poker to
drive out to the house and take a look at the woman."  He was
guilty of an absurd and boyish tactlessness when he heard Norblom
observing to the postmaster, "A fellow that calls himself a doctor
just because he had luck with that fool Agnes Ingleblad, he hadn't
ought to go getting drunk and disgracing--"

Martin stopped.  "Norblom!  You talking about me?"

The storekeeper turned slowly.  "I got more important things to do
'n talk about you," he cackled.

As Martin went on he heard laughter.

He told himself that these villagers were generous; that their
snooping was in part an affectionate interest, and inevitable in a
village where the most absorbing event of the year was the United
Brethren Sunday School picnic on Fourth of July.  But he could not
rid himself of twitchy discomfort at their unending and maddeningly
detailed comments on everything.  He felt as though the lightest
word he said in his consultation-room would be megaphoned from
flapping ear to ear all down the country roads.

He was contented enough in gossiping about fishing with the barber,
nor was he condescending to meteorologicomania, but except for
Leora he had no one with whom he could talk of his work.  Angus
Duer had been cold, but Angus had his teeth into every change of
surgical technique, and he was an acrid debater.  Martin saw that,
unless he struggled, not only would he harden into timid morality
under the pressure of the village, but be fixed in a routine of
prescriptions and bandaging.

He might find a stimulant in Dr. Hesselink of Groningen.

He had seen Hesselink only once, but everywhere he heard of him as
the most honest practitioner in the Valley.  On impulse Martin
drove down to call on him.

Dr. Hesselink was a man of forty, ruddy, tall, broad-shouldered.
You knew immediately that he was careful and that he was afraid of
nothing, however much he might lack in imagination.  He received
Martin with no vast ebullience, and his stare said, "Well, what do
you want?  I'm a busy man."

"Doctor," Martin chattered, "do you find it hard to keep up with
medical developments?"

"No.  Read the medical journals."

"Well, don't you--gosh, I don't want to get sentimental about it,
but don't you find that without contact with the Big Guns you get
mentally lazy--sort of lacking in inspiration?"

"I do not!  There's enough inspiration for me in trying to help the
sick."

To himself Martin was protesting, "All right, if you don't want to
be friendly, go to the devil!"  But he tried again:

"I know.  But for the game of the thing, for the pleasure of
increasing medical knowledge, how can you keep up if you don't have
anything but routine practice among a lot of farmers?"

"Arrowsmith, I may do you an injustice, but there's a lot of you
young practitioners who feel superior to the farmers, that are
doing their own jobs better than you are.  You think that if you
were only in the city with libraries and medical meetings and
everything, you'd develop.  Well, I don't know of anything to
prevent your studying at home!  You consider yourself so much
better educated than these rustics, but I notice you say 'gosh' and
'Big Guns' and that sort of thing.  How much do you read?
Personally, I'm extremely well satisfied.  My people pay me an
excellent living wage, they appreciate my work, and they honor me
by election to the schoolboard.  I find that a good many of these
farmers think a lot harder and squarer than the swells I meet in
the city.  Well!  I don't see any reason for feeling superior, or
lonely either!"

"Hell, I don't!" Martin mumbled.  As he drove back he raged at
Hesselink's superiority about not feeling superior, but he stumbled
into uncomfortable meditation.  It was true; he was half-educated.
He was supposed to be a college graduate but he knew nothing of
economics, nothing of history, nothing of music or painting.
Except in hasty bolting for examinations he had read no poetry save
that of Robert Service, and the only prose besides medical
journalism at which he looked nowadays was the baseball and murder
news in the Minneapolis papers and Wild West stories in the
magazines.

He reviewed the "intelligent conversation" which, in the desert of
Wheatsylvania, he believed himself to have conducted at Mohalis.
He remembered that to Clif Clawson it had been pretentious to use
any phrase which was not as colloquial and as smutty as the speech
of a truck-driver, and that his own discourse had differed from
Clif's largely in that it had been less fantastic and less
original.  He could recall nothing save the philosophy of Max
Gottlieb, occasional scoldings of Angus Duer, one out of ten among
Madeline Fox's digressions, and the councils of Dad Silva which was
above the level of Alec Ingleblad's barber-shop.

He came home hating Hesselink but by no means loving himself; he
fell upon Leora and, to her placid agreement, announced that they
were "going to get educated, if it kills us."  He went at it as he
had gone at bacteriology.

He read European history aloud at Leora, who looked interested or
at least forgiving; he worried the sentences in a copy of "The
Golden Bowl" which an unfortunate school-teacher had left at the
Tozers'; he borrowed a volume of Conrad from the village editor and
afterward, as he drove the prairie roads, he was marching into
jungle villages--sun helmets, orchids, lost temples of obscene and
dog-faced deities, secret and sun-scarred rivers.  He was conscious
of his own mean vocabulary.  It cannot be said that he became
immediately and conspicuously articulate, yet it is possible that
in those long intense evenings of reading with Leora he advanced a
step or two toward the tragic enchantments of Max Gottlieb's world--
enchanting sometimes and tragic always.

But in becoming a schoolboy again he was not so satisfied as Dr.
Hesselink.


IV


Gustaf Sondelius was back in America.

In medical school, Martin had read of Sondelius, the soldier of
science.  He held reasonable and lengthy degrees, but he was a rich
man and eccentric, and neither toiled in laboratories nor had a
decent office and a home and a lacy wife.  He roamed the world
fighting epidemics and founding institutions and making inconvenient
speeches and trying new drinks.  He was a Swede by birth, a German
by education, a little of everything by speech, and his clubs were
in London, Paris, Washington, and New York.  He had been heard of
from Batoum and Fuchau, from Milan and Bechuanaland, from
Antofagasta and Cape Romanzoff.  Manson on Tropical Diseases
mentions Sondelius's admirable method of killing rats with
hydrocyanic acid gas, and The Sketch once mentioned his atrocious
system in baccarat.

Gustaf Sondelius shouted, in high places and low, that most
diseases could be and must be wiped out; that tuberculosis, cancer,
typhoid, the plague, influenza, were an invading army against which
the world must mobilize--literally; that public health authorities
must supersede generals and oil kings.  He was lecturing through
America, and his exclamatory assertions were syndicated in the
press.

Martin sniffed at most newspaper articles touching on science or
health but Sondelius's violence caught him, and suddenly he was
converted, and it was an important thing for him, that conversion.

He told himself that however much he might relieve the sick,
essentially he was a business man, in rivalry with Dr. Winter of
Leopolis and Dr. Hesselink of Groningen; that though they might be
honest, honesty and healing were less their purpose than making
money; that to get rid of avoidable disease and produce a healthy
population would be the worst thing in the world for them; and that
they must all be replaced by public health officials.

Like all ardent agnostics, Martin was a religious man.  Since the
death of his Gottlieb-cult he had unconsciously sought a new
passion, and he found it now in Gustaf Sondelius's war on disease.
Immediately he became as annoying to his patients as he had once
been to Digamma Pi.

He informed the farmers at Delft that they had no right to have so
much tuberculosis.

This was infuriating, because none of their rights as American
citizens was better established, or more often used, than the
privilege of being ill.  They fumed, "Who does he think he is?  We
call him in for doctoring, not for bossing.  Why, the damn' fool
said we ought to burn down our houses--said we were committing a
crime if we had the con. here!  Won't stand for nobody talking to
me like that!"

Everything became clear to Martin--too clear.  The nation must make
the best physicians autocratic officials, at once, and that was all
there was to it.  As to how the officials were to become perfect
executives, and how people were to be persuaded to obey them, he
had no suggestions but only a beautiful faith.  At breakfast he
scolded, "Another idiotic day of writing prescriptions for
bellyaches that ought never to have happened!  If I could only get
into the Big Fight, along with men like Sondelius!  It makes me
tired!"

Leora murmured, "Yes, darling.  I'll promise to be good.  I won't
have any little bellyaches or T.B. or anything, so please don't
lecture me!"

Even in his irritability he was gentle, for Leora was with child.


V


Their baby was coming in five months.  Martin promised to it
everything he had missed.

"He's going to have a real education!" he gloated, as they sat on
the porch in spring twilight.  "He'll learn all this literature and
stuff.  We haven't done much ourselves--here we are, stuck in this
two-by-twice crossroads for the rest of our lives--but maybe we've
gone a little beyond our dads, and he'll go way beyond us."

He was worried, for all his flamboyance.  Leora had undue morning
sickness.  Till noon she dragged about the house, pea-green and
tousled and hollow-faced.  He found a sort of maid, and came home
to help, to wipe the dishes and sweep the front walk.  All evening
he read to her, not history now and Henry James but "Mrs. Wiggs of
the Cabbage Patch," which both of them esteemed a very fine tale.
He sat on the floor by the grubby second-hand couch on which she
lay in her weakness; he held her hand and crowed:

"Golly, we--  No, not 'golly.'  Well, what CAN you say except
'golly'?  Anyway:  Some day we'll save up enough money for a couple
months in Italy and all those places.  All those old narrow streets
and old castles!  There must be scads of 'em that are couple
hundred years old or older!  And we'll take the boy . . .  Even if
he turns out to be a girl, darn him! . . .  And he'll learn to
chatter Wop and French and everything like a regular native, and
his dad and mother'll be so proud!  Oh, we'll be a fierce pair of
old birds!  We never did have any more morals 'n a rabbit, either
of us, and probably when we're seventy we'll sit out on the
doorstep and smoke pipes and snicker at all the respectable people
going by, and tell each other scandalous stories about 'em till
they want to take a shot at us, and our boy--he'll wear a plug hat
and have a chauffeur--he won't dare to recognize us!"

Trained now to the false cheerfulness of the doctor, he shouted,
when she was racked and ghastly with the indignity of morning
sickness, "There, that's fine, old girl!  Wouldn't be making a good
baby if you weren't sick.  Everybody is."  He was lying, and he was
nervous.  Whenever he thought of her dying, he seemed to die with
her.  Barren of her companionship, there would be nothing he wanted
to do, nowhere to go.  What would be the worth of having all the
world if he could not show it to her, if she was not there--

He denounced Nature for her way of tricking human beings, by every
gay device of moonlight and white limbs and reaching loneliness,
into having babies, then making birth as cruel and clumsy and
wasteful as she could.  He was abrupt and jerky with patients who
called him into the country.  With their suffering he was
sympathetic as he had never been, for his eyes had opened to the
terrible beauty of pain, but he must not go far from Leora's need.

Her morning sickness turned into pernicious vomiting.  Suddenly,
while she was torn and inhuman with agony, he sent for Dr.
Hesselink, and that horrible afternoon when the prairie spring was
exuberant outside the windows of the poor iodoform-reeking room,
they took the baby from her, dead.

Had it been possible, he might have understood Hesselink's success
then, have noted that gravity and charm, that pity and sureness,
which made people entrust their lives to him.  Not cold and blaming
was Hesselink now, but an older and wiser brother, very
compassionate.  Martin saw nothing.  He was not a physician.  He
was a terrified boy, less useful to Hesselink than the dullest
nurse.

When he was certain that Leora would recover, Martin sat by her
bed, coaxing, "We'll just have to make up our minds we never can
have a baby now, and so I want--  Oh, I'm no good!  And I've got a
rotten temper.  But to you, I want to be everything!"

She whispered, scarce to be heard:

"He would have been such a sweet baby.  Oh, I know!  I saw him so
often.  Because I knew he was going to be like you, When you were a
baby."  She tried to laugh.  "Perhaps I wanted him because I could
boss him.  I've never had anybody that would let me boss him.  So
if I can't have a real baby, I'll have to bring you up.  Make you a
great man that everybody will wonder at, like your Sondelius. . . .
Darling, I worried so about your worrying--"

He kissed her, and for hours they sat together, unspeaking,
eternally understanding, in the prairie twilight.




Chapter 17



Dr. Coughlin of Leopolis had a red mustache, a large heartiness,
and a Maxwell which, though it was three years old this May and
deplorable as to varnish, he believed to be the superior in speed
and beauty of any motor in Dakota.

He came home in high cheerfulness, rode the youngest of his three
children pickaback, and remarked to his wife:

"Tessie, I got a swell idea."

"Yes, and you got a swell breath, too.  I wish you'd quit testing
that old Spirits Frumentus bottle at the drug store!"

"'At a girl!  But honest, listen!"

"I will not!"  She bussed him heartily.  "Nothing doing about
driving to Los Angeles this summer.  Too far, with all the brats
squalling."

"Sure.  All right.  But I mean:  Let's pack up and light out and
spend a week touring 'round the state.  Say tomorrow or next day.
Got nothing to keep me now except that obstetrical case, and we'll
hand that over to Winter."

"All right.  We can try out the new thermos bottles!"  Dr. Coughlin,
his lady, and the children started at four in the morning.  The car
was at first too well arranged to be interesting, but after three
days, as he approached you on the flat road that without an inch of
curving was slashed for leagues through the grassy young wheat, you
saw the doctor in his khaki suit, his horn-rimmed spectacles, and
white linen boating hat; his wife in a green flannel blouse and a
lace boudoir cap.  The rest of the car was slightly confused.  While
you motored by you noticed a canvas Egyptian Water Bottle, mud on
wheels and fenders, a spade, two older children leaning perilously
out and making tongues at you, the baby's diapers hanging on a line
across the tonneau, a torn copy of Snappy Stories, seven lollypop
sticks, a jack, a fish-rod, and a rolled tent.

Your last impression was of two large pennants labeled "Leopolis,
N. D.," and "Excuse Our Dust."

The Coughlins had agreeable adventures.  Once they were stuck in a
mud-hole.  To the shrieking admiration of the family, the doctor
got them out by making a bridge of fence rails.  Once the ignition
ceased and, while they awaited a garageman summoned by telephone,
they viewed a dairy farm with an electrical milking machine.  All
the way they were broadened by travel, and discovered the wonders
of the great world: the movie theater at Roundup, which had for
orchestra not only a hand-played piano but also a violin; the black
fox farm at Melody; and the Severance water-tower, which was said
to be the tallest in Central North Dakota.

Dr. Coughlin "dropped in to pass the time of day," as he said, with
all the doctors.  At St. Luke he had an intimate friend in Dr.
Tromp--at least they had met twice, at the annual meetings of the
Pony River Valley Medical Association.  When he told Tromp how bad
they had found the hotels, Tromp looked uneasy and conscientious,
and sighed, "If the wife could fix it up somehow, I'd like to
invite you all to stay with us tonight."

"Oh, don't want to impose on you.  Sure it wouldn't be any
trouble?" said Coughlin.

After Mrs. Tromp had recovered from her desire to call her husband
aside and make unheard but vigorous observations, and after the
oldest Tromp boy had learned that "it wasn't nice for a little
gentleman to kick his wee guests that came from so far, far away,"
they were all very happy.  Mrs. Coughlin and Mrs. Tromp bewailed
the cost of laundry soap and butter, and exchanged recipes for
pickled peaches, while the men, sitting on the edge of the porch,
their knees crossed, eloquently waving their cigars, gave
themselves up to the ecstasy of shop-talk:

"Say, Doctor, how do you find collections?"

(It was Coughlin speaking--or it might have been Tromp.)

"Well, they're pretty good.  These Germans pay up first rate.
Never send 'em a bill, but when they've harvested they come in and
say, 'How much do I owe you, Doctor?'"

"Yuh, the Germans are pretty good pay."

"Yump, they certainly are.  Not many dead-beats among the Germans."

"Yes, that's a fact.  Say, tell me, Doctor, what do you do with
your jaundice cases?"

"Well, I'll tell you, Doctor: if it's a persistent case I usually
give ammonium chlorid."

"Do you?  I've been giving ammonium chlorid but here the other day
I see a communication in the Journal of the A.M.A. where a fellow
was claiming it wasn't any good."

"Is that a fact!  Well, well!  I didn't see that.  Hum.  Well.
Say, Doctor, do you find you can do much with asthma?"

"Well now, Doctor, just in confidence, I'm going to tell you
something that may strike you as funny, but I believe that foxes'
lungs are fine for asthma, and T.B. too.  I told that to a Sioux
City pulmonary specialist one time and he laughed at me--said it
wasn't scientific--and I said to him, 'Hell!' I said, 'scientific!'
I said, 'I don't know if it's the latest fad and wrinkle in science
or not,' I said, 'but I get results, and that's what I'm looking
for 's results!' I said.  I tell you a plug G.P. may not have a lot
of letters after his name, but he sees a slew of mysterious things
that he can't explain, and I swear I believe most of these damn'
alleged scientists could learn a whale of a lot from the plain
country practitioners, let me tell you!"

"Yuh, that's a fact.  Personally I'd rather stay right here in the
country and be able to do a little hunting and take it easy than be
the classiest specialist in the cities.  One time I kind of figured
on becoming an X-ray specialist--place in New York where you can
take the whole course in eight weeks--and maybe settling in Butte
or Sioux Falls, but I figured that even if I got to making eight-
ten thousand a year, 'twouldn't hardly mean more than three
thousand does here and so--  And a fellow has to consider his duty
to his old patients."

"That's so. . . .  Say, Doctor, say, what sort of fellow is
McMinturn, down your way?"

"Well, I don't like to knock any fellow practitioner, and I suppose
he's well intentioned, but just between you and me he does too
confounded much guesswork.  Now you take you and me, we apply
SCIENCE to a case, instead of taking a chance and just relying on
experience and going off half-cocked.  But McMinturn, he doesn't
know enough.  And SAY, that wife of his, she's a caution--she's got
the meanest tongue in four counties, and the way she chases around
drumming up business for Mac--  Well, I suppose that's their way of
doing business."

"Is old Winter keeping going?"

"Oh, yes, in a sort of way.  You know how he is.  Of course he's
about twenty years behind the times, but he's a great hand-holder--
keep some fool woman in bed six weeks longer than he needs to, and
call around twice a day and chin with her--absolutely unnecessary."

"I suppose you get your biggest competition from Silzer, Doctor?"

"Don't you believe it, Doctor!  He isn't beginning to do the
practice he lets on to.  Trouble with Silzer is, he's too brash--
shoots off his mouth too much--likes to hear himself talk.  Oh,
say, by the way, have you run into this new fellow--will been
located here about two years now--at Wheatsylvania--Arrowsmith?"

"No, but they say he's a good bright young fellow."

"Yes, they claim he's a brainy man--very well-informed--and I hear
his wife is a nice brainy little woman."

"I hear Arrowsmith hits it up too much though--likes his booze
awful' well."

"Yes, so they say.  Shame, for a nice hustling young fellow.  I
like a nip myself, now and then, but a Drinking Man--!  Suppose
he's drunk and gets called out on a case!  And a fellow from down
there was telling me Arrowsmith is great on books and study, but
he's a freethinker--never goes to church."

"Is that a fact!  Hm.  Great mistake for any doctor to not identify
himself with some good solid religious denomination, whether he
believes the stuff or not.  I tell you a priest or a preacher can
send you an awful lot of business."

"You bet he can!  Well, this fellow said Arrowsmith was always
arguing with the preachers--he told some Reverend that everybody
ought to read this immunologist Max Gottlieb, and this Jacques
Loeb--you know--the fellow that, well, I don't recall just exactly
what it was, but he claimed he could create living fishes out of
chemicals."

"Sure!  There you got it!  That's the kind of delusions these
laboratory fellows get unless they have some practical practice to
keep 'em well balanced.  Well, if Arrowsmith falls for that kind of
fellow, no wonder people don't trust him."

"That's so.  Hm.  Well, it's too bad Arrowsmith goes drinking and
helling around and neglecting his family and his patients.  I can
see his finish.  Shame.  Well--wonder what time o' night it's
getting to be?"


II


Bert Tozer wailed, "Mart, what you been doing to Dr. Coughlin of
Leopolis?  Fellow told me he was going around saying you were a
booze-hoister and so on."

"Did he?  People do sort of keep an eye on one another around here,
don't they?"

"You bet your life they do, and that's why I tell you you ought to
cut out the poker and the booze.  You don't see ME needing any
liquor, do you?"

Martin more desperately than ever felt the whole county watching
him.  He was not a praise-eater; he was not proud that he should
feel misplaced; but however sturdily he struggled he saw himself
outside the picture of Wheatsylvania and trudging years of country
practice.

Suddenly, without planning it, forgetting in his admiration for
Sondelius and the health war his pride of the laboratory, he was
thrown into a research problem.


III


There was blackleg among the cattle in Crynssen County.  The state
veterinarian had been called and Dawson Hunziker vaccine had been
injected, but the disease spread.  Martin heard the farmers
wailing.  He noted that the injected cattle showed no inflammation
nor rise in temperature.  He was roused by a suspicion that the
Hunziker vaccine had insufficient living organisms, and he went
yelping on the trail of his hypothesis.

He obtained (by misrepresentations) a supply of the vaccine and
tested it in his stuffy closet of a laboratory.  He had to work out
his own device for growing anaerobic cultures, but he had been
trained by the Gottlieb who remarked, "Any man dat iss unable to
build a filter out of toot'-picks, if he has to, would maybe better
buy his results along with his fine equipment."  Out of a large
fruit-jar and a soldered pipe Martin made his apparatus.

When he was altogether sure that the vaccine did not contain living
blackleg organisms, he was much more delighted than if he had found
that good Mr. Dawson Hunziker was producing honest vaccine.

With no excuse and less encouragement he isolated blackleg
organisms from sick cattle and prepared an attenuated vaccine of
his own.  It took much time.  He did not neglect his patients but
certainly he failed to appear in the stores, at the poker games.
Leora and he dined on a sandwich every evening and hastened to the
laboratory, to heat the cultures in the improvised water-bath, an
ancient and leaky oatmeal-cooker with an alcohol lamp.  The Martin
who had been impatient of Hesselink was of endless patience as he
watched his results.  He whistled and hummed, and the hours from
seven to midnight were a moment.  Leora, frowning placidly, the tip
of her tongue at the corner of her mouth, guarded the temperature
like a good little watchdog.

After three efforts with two absurd failures, he had a vaccine
which satisfied him, and he injected a stricken herd.  The blackleg
stopped, which was for Martin the end and the reward, and he turned
his notes and supply of vaccine over to the state veterinarian.
For others, it was not the end.  The veterinarian of the county
denounced him for intruding on their right to save or kill cattle;
the physicians hinted, "That's the kind of monkey-business that
ruins the dignity of the profession.  I tell you Arrowsmith's a
medical nihilist and a notoriety-seeker, that's what he is.  You
mark my words, instead of his sticking to decent regular practice,
you'll be hearing of his opening a quack sanitarium, one of these
days!"

He commented to Leora:

"Dignity, hell!  If I had my way I'd be doing research--oh, not
this cold detached stuff of Gottlieb but really practical work--and
then I'd have some fellow like Sondelius take my results and jam
'em down people's throats, and I'd make them and their cattle and
their tabby-cats healthy whether they wanted to be or not, that's
what I'd do!"

In this mood he read in his Minneapolis paper, between a half
column on the marriage of the light middleweight champion and three
lines devoted to the lynching of an I.W.W.  agitator, the
announcement:


Gustave Sundelios, well-known authority on cholera prevention, will
give an address on "Heroes of Health" at the University summer
school next Friday evening.


He ran into the house gloating, "Lee!  Sondelius going to lecture
in Minneapolis.  I'm going!  Come on!  We'll hear him and have a
bat and everything!"

"No, you run down by yourself.  Be fine for you to get away from
the town and the family and me for a while.  I'll go down with you
in the fall.  Honestly.  If I'm not in the way, maybe you can
manage to have a good long talk with Dr. Sondelius."

"Fat chance!  The big city physicians and the state health
authorities will be standing around him ten deep.  But I'm going."


IV


The prairie was hot, the wheat rattled in a weary breeze, the day-
coach was gritty with cinders.  Martin was cramped by the hours of
slow riding.  He drowsed and smoked and meditated.  "I'm going to
forget medicine and everything else," he vowed.  "I'll go up and
talk to somebody in the smoker and tell him I'm a shoe-salesman."

He did.  Unfortunately his confidant happened to be a real shoe-
salesman, with a large curiosity as to what firm Martin
represented, and he returned to the day coach with a renewed sense
of injury.  When he reached Minneapolis, in mid-afternoon, he
hastened to the University and besought a ticket to the Sondelius
lecture before he had even found a hotel, though not before he had
found the long glass of beer which he had been picturing for a
hundred miles.

He had an informal but agreeable notion of spending his first
evening of freedom in dissipation.  Somewhere he would meet a
company of worthies who would succor him with laughter and talk and
many drinks--not too many drinks, of course--and motor very rapidly
to Lake Minnetonka for a moonlight swim.  He began his search for
the brethren by having a cocktail at a hotel bar and dinner in a
Hennepin Avenue restaurant.  Nobody looked at him, nobody seemed to
desire a companion.  He was lonely for Leora, and all his state of
grace, all his earnest and simple-hearted devotion to carousal,
degenerated into sleepiness.

As he turned and turned in his hotel bed he lamented, "And probably
the Sondelius lecture will be rotten.  Probably he's simply another
Roscoe Geake."


V


In the hot night desultory students wandered up to the door of the
lecture-hall, scanned the modest Sondelius poster, and ambled away.
Martin was half minded to desert with them, and he went in sulkily.
The hall was a third full of summer students and teachers, and men
who might have been doctors or school-principals.  He sat at the
back, fanning with his straw hat, disliking the man with side-
whiskers who shared the row with him, disapproving of Gustaf
Sondelius, and as to himself having no good opinions whatever.

Then the room was charged with vitality.  Down the central aisle,
ineffectively attended by a small fussy person, thundered a man
with a smile, a broad brow, and a strawpile of curly flaxen hair--
a Newfoundland dog of a man.  Martin sat straight.  He was
strengthened to endure even the depressing man with side-whiskers
as Sondelius launched out, in a musical bellow with Swedish
pronunciation and Swedish singsong:

"The medical profession can have but one desire: to destroy the
medical profession.  As for the laymen, they can be sure of but one
thing: nine-tenths of what they know about health is not so, and
with the other tenth they do nothing.  As Butler shows in
'Erewhon'--the swine stole that idea from me, too, maybe thirty
years before I ever got it--the only crime for w'ich we should hang
people is having toobercoolosis."

"Umph!" grunted the studious audience, doubtful whether it was
fitting to be amused, offended, bored, or edified.

Sondelius was a roarer and a playboy, but he knew incantations.
With him Martin watched the heroes of yellow fever, Reed,
Agramonte, Carroll, and Lazear; with him he landed in a Mexican
port stilled with the plague and famished beneath the virulent sun;
with him rode up the mountain trails to a hill town rotted with
typhus; with him, in crawling August, when babies were parched
skeletons, fought an ice trust beneath the gilt and blunted sword
of the law.

"That's what I want to do!  Not just tinker at a lot of worn-out
bodies but make a new world!" Martin hungered.  "Gosh, I'd follow
him through fire!  And the way he lays out the crapehangers that
criticize public health results!  If I could only manage to meet
him and talk to him for a couple o' minutes--"

He lingered after the lecture.  A dozen people surrounded Sondelius
on the platform; a few shook hands; a few asked questions; a doctor
worried, "But how about the danger of free clinics and all those
things drifting into socialism?"  Martin stood back till Sondelius
had been deserted.  A janitor was closing the windows, very firmly
and suggestively.  Sondelius looked about, and Martin would have
sworn that the Great Man was lonely.  He shook hands with him, and
quaked:

"Sir, if you aren't due some place, I wonder if you'd like to come
out and have a--a--"

Sondelius loomed over him in solar radiance and rumbled, "Have a
drink?  Well, I think maybe I would.  How did the joke about the
dog and his fleas go tonight?  Do you think they liked it?"

"Oh, sure, you bet."

The warrior who had been telling of feeding five thousand Tatars,
of receiving a degree from a Chinese university and refusing a
decoration from quite a good Balkan king, looked affectionately on
his band of one disciple and demanded, "Was it all right--was it?
Did they like it?  So hot tonight, and I been lecturing nine time a
week--Des Moines, Fort Dodge, LaCrosse, Elgin, Joliet [but he
pronounced it Zho-lee-ay] and--I forget.  Was it all right?  Did
they like it?"

"Simply corking!  Oh, they just ate it up!  Honestly, I've never
enjoyed anything so much in my life!"

The prophet crowed, "Come!  I buy a drink.  As a hygienist, I war
on alcohol.  In excessive quantities it is almost as bad as coffee
or even ice cream soda.  But as one who is fond of talking, I find
a nice long whisky and soda a great solvent of human idiocy.  Is
there a cool place with some Pilsener here in Detroit--no; where am
I tonight?--Minneapolis?"

"I understand there's a good beer-garden.  And we can get the
trolley right near here."

Sondelius stared at him.  "Oh, I have a taxi waiting."

Martin was abashed by this luxury.  In the taxi-cab he tried to
think of the proper things to say to a celebrity.

"Tell me, Doctor, do they have city health boards in Europe?"

Sondelius ignored him.  "Did you see that girl going by?  What
ankles!  What shoulders!  Is it good beer at the beer-garden?  Have
they any decent cognac?  Do you know Courvoisier 1865 cognac?  Oof!
Lecturing!  I swear I will give it up.  And wearing dress clothes a
night like this!  You know, I mean all the crazy things I say in my
lectures, but let us now forget being earnest, let us drink, let us
sing 'Der Graf von Luxemburg,' let us detach exquisite girls from
their escorts, let us discuss the joys of 'Die Meistersinger,'
which only I appreciate!"

In the beer-garden the tremendous Sondelius discoursed of the
Cosmos Club, Halle's investigation of infant mortality, the
suitability of combining benedictine and apple-jack, Biarritz, Lord
Haldane, the Doane-Buckley method of milk examination, George
Gissing, and homard thermidor.  Martin looked for a connection
between Sondelius and himself, as one does with the notorious or
with people met abroad.  He might have said, "I think I met a man
who knows you," or "I have had the pleasure of reading all your
articles," but he fished with "Did you ever run into the two big
men in my medical school--Winnemac--Dean Silva and Max Gottlieb?"

"Silva?  I don't remember.  But Gottlieb--you know him?  Oh!"
Sondelius waved his mighty arms.  "The greatest!  The spirit of
science!  I had the pleasure to talk with him at McGurk.  He would
not sit here bawling like me!  He makes me like a circus clown!  He
takes all my statements about epidemiology and shows me I am a
fool!  Ho, ho, ho!"  He beamed, and was off on a denunciation of
high tariff.

Each topic had its suitable refreshment.  Sondelius was a fantastic
drinker, and zinc-lined.  He mixed Pilsener, whisky, black coffee,
and a liquid which the waiter asserted to be absinthe.  "I should
go to bed at midnight," he lamented, "but it is a cardinal sin to
interrupt good talk.  Yoost tempt me a little!  I am an easy one to
be tempted!  But I must have five hours' sleep.  Absolute!  I
lecture in--it's some place in Iowa--tomorrow evening.  Now that I
am past fifty, I cannot get along with three hours as I used to,
and yet I have found so many new things that I want to talk about."

He was more eloquent than ever; then he was annoyed.  A surly-
looking man at the next table listened and peered, and laughed at
them.  Sondelius dropped from Haffkine's cholera serum to an irate:

"If that fellow stares at me some more, I am going over and kill
him!  I am a peaceful man, now that I am not so young, but I do not
like starers.  I will go and argue with him.  I will yoost hit him
a little!"

While the waiters came rushing, Sondelius charged the man,
threatened him with enormous fists, then stopped, shook hands
repeatedly, and brought him back to Martin.

"This is a born countryman of mine, from Gottenborg.  He is a
carpenter.  Sit down, Nilsson, sit down and have a drink.  Herumph!
VAI-ter!"

The carpenter was a socialist, a Swedish Seventh Day Adventist, a
ferocious arguer, and fond of drinking aquavit.  He denounced
Sondelius as an aristocrat, he denounced Martin for his ignorance
of economics, he denounced the waiter concerning the brandy;
Sondelius and Martin and the waiter answered with vigor; and the
conversation became admirable.  Presently they were turned out of
the beer-garden and the three of them crowded into the still
waiting taxicab, which shook to their debating.  Where they went,
Martin could never trace.  He may have dreamed the whole tale.
Once they were apparently in a roadhouse on a long street which
must have been University Avenue; once in a saloon on Washington
Avenue South, where three tramps were sleeping at the end of the
bar; once in the carpenter's house, where an unexplained man made
coffee for them.

Wherever they might be, they were at the same time in Moscow and
Curacao and Murwillumbah.  The carpenter created communistic
states, while Sondelius, proclaiming that he did not care whether
he worked under socialism or an emperor so long as he could bully
people into being well, annihilated tuberculosis and by dawn had
cancer fleeing.

They parted at four, tearfully swearing to meet again, in Minnesota
or Stockholm, in Rio or on the southern seas, and Martin started
for Wheatsylvania to put an end to all this nonsense of allowing
people to be ill.

And the great god Sondelius had slain Dean Silva, as Silva had
slain Gottlieb, Gottlieb had slain "Encore" Edwards the playful
chemist, Edwards had slain Doc Vickerson, and Vickerson had slain
the minister's son who had a real trapeze in his barn.




Chapter 18



Dr. Woestijne of Vanderheide's Grove acted in spare time as
Superintendent of Health for Crynssen County, but the office was
not well paid and it did not greatly interest him.  When Martin
burst in and offered to do all the work for half the pay, Woestijne
accepted with benevolence, assuring him that it would have a great
effect on his private practice.

It did.  It almost ruined his private practice.

There was never an official appointment.  Martin signed Woestijne's
name (spelling it in various interesting ways, depending on how he
felt) to papers, and the Board of County Commissioners recognized
Martin's limited power, but the whole thing was probably illegal.

There was small science and considerably less heroism in his first
furies as a health officer, but a great deal of irritation for his
fellow-townsmen.  He poked into yards, he denounced Mrs. Beeson for
her reeking ash-barrels, Mr. Norblom for piling manure on the
street, and the schoolboard for the school ventilation and lack of
instruction in tooth-brushing.  The citizens had formerly been
agitated by his irreligion, his moral looseness, and his lack of
local patriotism, but when they were prodded out of their
comfortable and probably beneficial dirt, they exploded.

Martin was honest and appallingly earnest, but if he had the
innocence of the dove he lacked the wisdom of the serpent.  He did
not make them understand his mission; he scarce tried to make them
understand.  His authority, as Woestijne's alter ego, was imposing
on paper but feeble in action, and it was worthless against the
stubbornness which he aroused.

He advanced from garbage-spying to a drama of infection.  The
community at Delft had a typhoid epidemic which slackened and
continually reappeared.  The villagers believed that it came from a
tribe of squatters six miles up the creek, and they considered
lynching the offenders, as a practical protest and an interesting
break in wheat-farming.  When Martin insisted that in six miles the
creek would purify any waste and that the squatters were probably
not the cause, he was amply denounced.

"He's a fine one, he is, to go around blatting that we'd ought to
have more health precautions!  Here we go and show him where
there's some hellhounds that ought to be shot, and them only
Bohunks anyway, and he doesn't do a darn' thing but shoot a lot of
hot air about germicidal effect or whatever the fool thing is,"
remarked Kaes, the wheat-buyer at the Delft elevator.

Flashing through the county, not neglecting but certainly not
enlarging his own practice, Martin mapped every recent case of
typhoid within five miles of Delft.  He looked into milk-routes and
grocery deliveries.  He discovered that most of the cases had
appeared after the visits of an itinerant seamstress, a spinster
virtuous and almost painfully hygienic.  She had had typhoid four
years before.

"She's a chronic carrier of the bugs.  She's got to be examined,"
he announced.

He found her sewing at the house of an old farmer-preacher.

With modest indignation she refused to be examined, and as he went
away she could be heard weeping at the insult, while the preacher
cursed him from the doorstep.  He returned with the township police
officer and had the seamstress arrested and confined in the
segregation ward of the county poor-farm.  In her discharges he
found billions of typhoid bacilli.

The frail and decent body was not comfortable in the board-lined
whitewashed ward.  She was shamed and frightened.  She had always
been well beloved, a gentle, shabby, bright-eyed spinster who
brought presents to the babies, helped the overworked farmwives to
cook dinner, and sang to the children in her thin sparrow voice.
Martin was reviled for persecuting her.  "He wouldn't dare pick on
her if she wasn't so poor," they said, and they talked of a jail-
delivery.

Martin fretted.  He called upon the seamstress at the poor-farm, he
tried to make her understand that there was no other place for her,
he brought her magazines and sweets.  But he was firm.  She could
not go free.  He was convinced that she had caused at least one
hundred cases of typhoid, with nine deaths.

The county derided him.  Cause typhoid now, when she had been well
for four years?  The County Commissioners and the County Board of
Health called Dr. Hesselink in from the next county.  He agreed
with Martin and his maps.  Every meeting of the Commissioners was a
battle now, and it was uncertain whether Martin would be ruined or
throned.

Leora saved him and the seamstress.  "Why not take up a collection
to send her off to some big hospital where she can be treated, or
where they can keep her if she can't be cured?" said she.

The seamstress entered a sanitarium--and was amiably forgotten by
everyone for the rest of her life--and his recent enemies said of
Martin, "He's mighty smart, and right on the job."  Hesselink drove
over to inform him, "You did pretty well this time, Arrowsmith.
Glad to see you're settling down to business."

Martin was slightly cocky, and immediately bounded after a fine new
epidemic.  He was so fortunate as to have a case of small-pox and
several which he suspected.  Some of these lay across the border in
Mencken County, Hesselink's domain, and Hesselink laughed at him.
"It's probably chicken-pox, except your one case.  Mighty rarely
you get small-pox in summer," he chuckled, while Martin raged up
and down the two counties, proclaiming the scourge, imploring
everyone to be vaccinated, thundering, "There's going to be all
hell let loose here in ten or fifteen days!"

But the United Brethren parson, who served chapels in Wheatsylvania
and two other villages, was an anti-vaccinationist and he preached
against it.  The villages sided with him.  Martin went from house
to house, beseeching them, offering to treat them without charge.
As he had never taught them to love him and follow him as a leader,
they questioned, they argued long and easily on doorsteps, they
cackled that he was drunk.  Though for weeks his strongest draft
had been the acrid coffee of the countryside, they peeped one to
another that he was drunk every night, that the United Brethren
minister was about to expose him from the pulpit.

And ten dreadful days went by and fifteen, and all but the first
case did prove to be chicken-pox.  Hesselink gloated and the
village roared and Martin was the butt of the land.

He had only a little resented their gossip about his wickedness,
only in evenings of slow depression had he meditated upon fleeing
from them, but at their laughter he was black furious.

Leora comforted him with cool hands.  "It'll pass over," she said.
But it did not pass.

By autumn it had become such a burlesque epic as peasants love
through all the world.  He had, they mirthfully related, declared
that anybody who kept hogs would die of small-pox; he had been
drunk for a week, and diagnosed everything from gall-stones to
heart-burn as small-pox.  They greeted him, with no meaning of
offense in their snickering, "Got a pimple on my chin, Doc.  What
is 't--small-pox?"

More terrible than their rage is the people's laughter, and if it
rends tyrants, with equal zest it pursues the saint and wise man
and befouls their treasure.

When the neighborhood suddenly achieved a real epidemic of
diphtheria and Martin shakily preached antitoxin, one-half of them
remembered his failure to save Mary Novak and the other half
clamored, "Oh, give us a rest!  You got epidemics on the brain!"
That a number of children quite adequately died did not make them
relinquish their comic epic.

Then it was that Martin came home to Leora and said quietly, "I'm
licked.  I've got to get out.  Nothing more I can do here.  Take
years before they'd trust me again.  They're so damned HUMOROUS!
I'm going to go get a real job--public health."

"I'm so glad!  You're too good for them here.  We'll find some big
place where they'll appreciate your work."

"No, that's not fair.  I've learned a little something.  I've
failed here.  I've antagonized too many people.  I didn't know how
to handle them.  We could stick it out, and I would, except that
life is short and I think I'm a good worker in some ways.  Been
worrying about being a coward, about running away, 'turning my--'
What is it?  '--turning my hand from the plow.'  I don't care now!
By God, I know what I can do!  Gottlieb saw it!  And I want to get
to work.  On we go.  All right?"

"Of course!"


II


He had read in the Journal of the American Medical Association that
Gustaf Sondelius was giving a series of lectures at Harvard.  He
wrote asking whether he knew of a public health appointment.
Sondelius answered, in a profane and blotty scrawl, that he
remembered with joy their Minneapolis vacation, that he disagreed
with Entwisle of Harvard about the nature of metathrombin, that
there was an excellent Italian restaurant in Boston, and that he
would inquire among his health-official friends as to a position.

Two days later he wrote that Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh Director of
Public Health in the city of Nautilus, Iowa, was looking for a
second-in--command, and would probably be willing to send
particulars.

Leora and Martin swooped on an almanac.

Gosh!  Sixty-nine thousand people in Nautilus!  Against three
hundred and sixty-six here--no, wait, it's three hundred and sixty-
seven now, with that new baby of Pete Yeska's that the dirty swine
called in Hesselink for.  People!  People that can talk!  Theaters!
Maybe concerts!  Leora, we'll be like a pair of kids let loose from
school!"

He telegraphed for details, to the enormous interest of the station
agent, who was also telegraph operator.

The mimeographed form which was sent to him said that Dr.
Pickerbaugh required an assistant who would be the only full-time
medical officer besides Pickerbaugh himself, as the clinic and
school doctors were private physicians working part-time.  The
assistant would be epidemiologist, bacteriologist, and manager of
the office clerks, the nurses, and the lay inspectors of dairies
and sanitation.  The salary would be twenty-five hundred dollars a
year--against the fifteen or sixteen hundred Martin was making in
Wheatsylvania.

Proper recommendations were desired.

Martin wrote to Sondelius, to Dad Silva, and to Max Gottlieb, now
at the McGurk Institute in New York.

Dr. Pickerbaugh informed him, "I have received very pleasant
letters from Dean Silva and Dr. Sondelius about you, but the letter
from Dr. Gottlieb is quite remarkable.  He says you have rare gifts
as a laboratory man.  I take great pleasure in offering you the
appointment; kindly wire."

Not till then did Martin completely realize that he was leaving
Wheatsylvania--the tedium of Bert Tozer's nagging--the spying of
Pete Yeska and the Norbloms--the inevitability of turning, as so
many unchanging times he had turned, south from the Leopolis road
at the Two Mile Grove and following again that weary, flat,
unbending trail--the superiority of Dr. Hesselink and the malice of
Dr. Coughlin--the round which left him no time for his dusty
laboratory--leaving it all for the achievement and splendor of the
great city of Nautilus.

"Leora, we're going!  We're really going!"


III


Bert Tozer said:

"You know by golly there's folks that would call you a traitor,
after all we've done for you, even if you did pay back the
thousand, to let some other doc come in here and get all that
influence away from the Family."

Ada Quist said:

"I guess if you ain't any too popular with the folks around here
you'll have one fine time in a big city like Nautilus!  Well Bert
and me are going to get married next year and when you two swells
make a failure of it I suppose we'll have to take care of you at
our house when you come sneaking back do you think we could get
your house at the same rent you paid for it oh Bert why couldn't we
take Mart's office instead it would save money well I've always
said since we were in school together you couldn't stand a decent
regular life Ory."

Mr. Tozer said:

"I simply can't understand it, with everything going so nice.  Why,
you'd be making three-four thousand a year some day, if you just
stuck to it.  Haven't we tried to treat you nice?  I don't like to
have my little girl go away and leave me alone, now I'm getting on
in years.  And Bert gets so cranky with me and Mother, but you and
Ory would always kind of listen to us.  Can't you fix it somehow so
you could stay?"

Pete Yeska said:

"Doc, you could of knocked me down with a feather when I heard you
were going!  Course you and me have scrapped about this drug
business, but Lord! I been kind of half thinking about coming
around some time and offering you a partnership and let you run the
drug end to suit yourself, and we could get the Buick agency,
maybe, and work up a nice little business.  I'm real sorry you're
going to leave us. . . .  Well, come back some day and we'll take a
shot at the ducks, and have a good laugh about that bull you made
over the smallpox.  I never will forget that!  I was saying to the
old woman just the other day, when she had an ear-ache, 'Ain't got
smallpox, have yuh, Bess!'"

Dr. Hesselink said:

"Doctor, what's this I hear?  You're not going away?  Why, you and
I were just beginning to bring medical practice in this neck of the
woods up to where it ought to be, so I drove over tonight--Huh?  We
panned you?  Ye-es, I suppose we did, but that doesn't mean we
didn't appreciate you.  Small place like here or Groningen, you
have to roast your neighbors to keep busy.  Why, Doctor, I've been
watching you develop from an unlicked cub to a real upstanding
physician, and now you're going away--you don't know how I feel!"

Henry Novak said:

"Why, Doc, you ain't going to LEAVE us?  And we got a new baby
coming, and I said to the woman, just the other day, 'It's a good
thing we got a doctor that hands you out the truth and not all this
guff we used to get from Doc Winter.'"

The wheat-buyer at Delft said:

"Doc, what's this I hear?  You ain't going AWAY?  A fellow told me
you was and I says to him, 'Don't be more of a damn' fool than the
Lord meant you to be,' I says.  But I got to worrying about it, and
I drove over and--Doc, I fire off my mouth pretty easy, I guess.  I
was agin you in the typhoid epidemic, when you said that seamstress
was carrying the sickness around, and then you showed me up good.
Doc, if you'd like to be state senator, and if you'll stay--I got
quite a little influence--believe me, I'll get out and work my
shirt off for you!"

Alec Ingleblad said:

"You're a lucky guy!"

All the village was at the train when they left for Nautilus.

For a hundred autumn-blazing miles Martin mourned his neighbors.
"I feel like getting off and going back.  Didn't we used to have
fun playing Five Hundred with the Fraziers!  I hate to think of the
kind of doctor they may get.  I swear, if some quack settles there
or if Woestijne neglects the health work again, I'll go back and
run 'em both out of business!  And be kind of fun to be state
senator, some ways."

But as evening thickened and nothing in all the rushing world
existed save the yellow Pintsch gas globes above them in the long
car, they saw ahead of them great Nautilus, high honor and
achievement, the making of a radiant model city and the praise of
Sondelius--perhaps even of Max Gottlieb.




Chapter 19



Midmost of the black-soiled Iowa plain, watered only by a shallow
and insignificant creek, the city of Nautilus bakes and rattles and
glistens.  For hundreds of miles the tall corn springs in a jungle
of undeviating rows, and the stranger who sweatily trudges the
corn-walled roads is lost and nervous with the sense of merciless
growth.

Nautilus is to Zenith what Zenith is to Chicago.

With seventy thousand people, it is a smaller Zenith but no less
brisk.  There is one large hotel to compare with the dozen in
Zenith, but that one is as busy and standardized and frenziedly
modern as its owner can make it.  The only authentic difference
between Nautilus and Zenith is that in both cases all the streets
look alike but in Nautilus they do not look alike for so many
miles.

The difficulty in defining its quality is that no one has
determined whether it is a very large village or a very small city.
There are houses with chauffeurs and Bacardi cocktails, but on
August evenings all save a few score burghers sit in their shirt-
sleeves on front porches.  Across from the ten-story office
building, in which a little magazine of the New Prose is published
by a young woman who for five months lived in the cafes of
Montparnasse, is an old frame mansion comfortable with maples, and
a line of Fords and lumber-wagons in which the overalled farmers
have come to town.

Iowa has the richest land, the lowest illiteracy rate, the largest
percentages of native-born whites and motor-car owners, and the
most moral and forward-looking cities of all the States, and
Nautilus is the most Iowan city in Iowa.  One out of every three
persons above the age of sixty has spent a winter in California,
and among them are the champion horseshoe pitcher of Pasadena and
the woman who presented the turkey which Miss Mary Pickford, the
cinema princess, enjoyed at her Christmas dinner in 1912.

Nautilus is distinguished by large houses with large lawns and by
an astounding quantity of garages and lofty church spires.  The fat
fields run up to the edge of the city, and the scattered factories,
the innumerable railroad side-tracks, and the scraggly cottages for
workmen are almost amid the corn.  Nautilus manufactures steel
windmills, agricultural implements, including the celebrated Daisy
Manure Spreader, and such corn-products as Maize Mealies, the
renowned breakfast-food.  It makes brick, it sells groceries
wholesale, and it is the headquarters of the Cornbelt Co-operative
Insurance Company.

One of its smallest but oldest industries is Mugford Christian
College, which has two hundred and seventeen students, and sixteen
instructors, of whom eleven are ministers of the Church of Christ.
The well-known Dr. Tom Bissex is football coach, health director,
and professor of hygiene, chemistry, physics, French, and German.
Its shorthand and piano departments are known far beyond the limits
of Nautilus, and once, though that was some years ago, Mugford held
the Grinnell College baseball team down to a score of eleven to
five.  It has never been disgraced by squabbles over teaching
evolutionary biology--it never has thought of teaching biology at
all.


II


Martin left Leora at the Sims House, the old-fashioned, second-best
hotel in Nautilus, to report to Dr. Pickerbaugh, Director of the
Department of Public Health.

The department was on an alley, in a semi-basement at the back of
that large graystone fungus, the City Hall.  When he entered the
drab reception-office he was highly received by the stenographer
and the two visiting nurses.  Into the midst of their flutterings--
"Did you have a good trip, Doctor?  Dr. Pickerbaugh didn't hardly
expect you till tomorrow, Doctor.  Is Mrs. Arrowsmith with you,
Doctor?"--charged Pickerbaugh, thundering welcomes.

Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh was forty-eight.  He was a graduate of
Mugford College and of the Wassau Medical School.  He looked
somewhat like President Roosevelt, with the same squareness and the
same bristly mustache, and he cultivated the resemblance.  He was a
man who never merely talked: he either bubbled or made orations.

He received Martin with four "Well's," which he gave after the
manner of a college cheer; he showed him through the Department,
led him into the Director's private office, gave him a cigar, and
burst the dam of manly silence:

"Doctor, I'm delighted to have a man with your scientific
inclinations.  Not that I should consider myself entirely without
them.  In fact I make it a regular practice to set aside a period
for scientific research, without a certain amount of which even the
most ardent crusade for health methods would scarcely make much
headway."

It sounded like the beginning of a long seminar.  Martin settled in
his chair.  He was doubtful about his cigar, but he found that it
helped him to look more interested.

"But with me, I admit, it's a matter of temperament.  I have often
hoped that, without any desire whatever for mere personal
aggrandizement, the powers above may yet grant me the genius to
become at once the Roosevelt and the Longfellow of the great and
universally growing movement for public health measures is your
cigar too mild, Doctor? or perhaps it would be better to say the
Kipling of public health rather than the Longfellow, because
despite the beautiful passages and high moral atmosphere of the
Sage of Cambridge, his poetry lacked the swing and punch of
Kipling.

"I assume you agree with me, or you will when you have had an
opportunity to see the effect our work has on the city, and the
success we have in selling the idea of Better Health, that what the
world needs is a really inspired, courageous, overtowering leader--
say a Billy Sunday of the movement--a man who would know how to use
sensationalism properly and wake the people out of their sloth.
Sometimes the papers, and I can only say they flatter me when they
compare me with Billy Sunday, the greatest of all evangelists and
Christian preachers--sometimes they claim that I'm too sensational.
Huh!  If they only could understand it, trouble is I can't be
sensational enough!  Still, I try, I try, and--  Look here.  Here's
a placard, it was painted by my daughter Orchid and the poetry is
my own humble effort, and let me tell you it gets quoted around
everywhere:


You can't get health
By a pussyfoot stealth,
So let's every health-booster
Crow just like a rooster.


"Then there's another--this is a minor thing; it doesn't try to
drive home general abstract principles, but it'd surprise you the
effect it's had on careless housewives, who of course don't mean to
neglect the health of their little ones and merely need instruction
and a little pep put into them, and when they see a card like this,
it makes 'em think:


Boil the milk bottles or by gum
You better buy your ticket to Kingdom Come.


"I've gotten quite a lot of appreciation in my small way for some
of these things that didn't hardly take me five minutes to dash
off.  Some day when you get time, glance over this volume of
clippings--just to show you, Doctor, what you can do if you go at
the Movement in the up-to-date and scientific manner.  This one,
about the temperance meeting I addressed in Des Moines--say, I had
that hall, and it was jam-pack-full, lifting right up on their feet
when I proved by statistics that ninety-three per cent of all
insanity is caused by booze!  Then this--well, it hasn't anything
to do with health, directly, but it'll just indicate the
opportunity you'll have here to get in touch with all the movements
for civic weal."

He held out a newspaper clipping in which, above a pen-and-ink
caricature portraying him with large mustached head on a tiny body,
was the headline:


DOC PICKERBAUGH BANNER BOOSTER
OF EVANGELINE COUNTY LEADS BIG
GO-TO-CHURCH DEMONSTRATION HERE


Pickerbaugh looked it over, reflecting, "That was a dandy meeting!
We increased church attendance here seventeen per cent!  Oh,
Doctor, you went to Winnemac and had your internship in Zenith,
didn't you?  Well, this might interest you then.  It's from the
Zenith Advocate-Times, and it's by Chum Frink, who, I think you'll
agree with me, ranks with Eddie Guest and Walt Mason as the
greatest, as they certainly are the most popular, of all our poets,
showing that you can bank every time on the literary taste of the
American Public.  Dear old Chum!  That was when I was in Zenith to
address the national convention of Congregational Sunday-schools, I
happen to be a Congregationalist myself, on 'The Morality of A1
Health.'  So Chum wrote this poem about me:"


Zenith welcomes with high hurraw
A friend in Almus Pickerbaugh,
The two-fisted fightin' poet doc
Who stands for health like Gibraltar's rock.
He's jammed with figgers and facts and fun,
The plucky old, lucky old son--of--a--gun!


For a moment the exuberant Dr. Pickerbaugh was shy.

"Maybe it's kind of immodest in me to show that around.  And when I
read a poem with such originality and swing, when I find a genu-ine
vest-pocket masterpiece like this, then I realize that I'm not a
poet at all, no matter how much my jingles may serve to jazz up the
Cause of Health.  My brainchildren may teach sanitation and do
their little part to save thousands of dear lives, but they aren't
literature, like what Chum Frink turns out.  No, I guess I'm
nothing but just a plain scientist in an office.

"Still you'll readily see how one of these efforts of mine, just by
having a good laugh and a punch and some melody in it, does gild
the pill and make careless folks stop spitting on the sidewalks,
and get out into God's great outdoors and get their lungs packed
full of ozone and lead a real hairy-chested he-life.  In fact you
might care to look over the first number of a little semi-yearly
magazine I'm just starting--I know for a fact that a number of
newspaper editors are going to quote from it and so carry on the
good work as well as boost my circulation."

He handed to Martin a pamphlet entitled Pickerbaugh Pickings.

In verse and aphorism, Pickings recommended good health, good
roads, good business, and the single standard of morality.  Dr.
Pickerbaugh backed up his injunctions with statistics as impressive
as those the Reverend Ira Hinkley had once used at Digamma Pi.
Martin was edified by an item which showed that among all families
divorced in Ontario, Tennessee, and Southern Wyoming in 1912, the
appalling number of fifty-three per cent of the husbands drank at
least one glass of whisky daily.

Before this warning had sunk in, Pickerbaugh snatched Pickings from
him with a boyish, "Oh, you won't want to read any more of my rot.
You can look it over some future time.  But this second volume of
my clippings may perhaps interest you, just as a hint of what a
fellow can do."

While he considered the headlines in the scrapbook, Martin realized
that Dr. Pickerbaugh was vastly better known than he had realized.
He was exposed as the founder of the first Rotary Club in Iowa;
superintendent of the Jonathan Edwards Congregational Sunday School
of Nautilus; president of the Moccasin Ski and Hiking Club, of the
West Side Bowling Club, and the 1912 Bull Moose and Roosevelt Club;
organizer and cheerleader of a Joint Picnic of the Woodmen, Moose,
Elks, Masons, Odd Fellows, Turnverein, Knights of Columbus, B'nai
Brith, and the Y.M.C.A.; and winner of the prizes both for reciting
the largest number of Biblical texts and for dancing the best Irish
jig at the Harvest Moon Soiree of the Jonathan Edwards Bible Class
for the Grown-ups.

Martin read of him as addressing the Century Club of Nautilus on "A
Yankee Doctor's Trip Through Old Europe," and the Mugford College
Alumni Association on "Wanted:  A Man-sized Feetball Coach for Old
Mugford."  But outside of Nautilus as well, there were loud alarums
of his presence.

He had spoken at the Toledo Chamber of Commerce Weekly Luncheon on
"More Health--More Bank Clearings."  He had edified the National
Interurban Trolley Council, meeting at Wichita, on "Health Maxims
for Trolley Folks."  Seven thousand, six hundred Detroit automobile
mechanics had listened to his observations on "Health First, Safety
Second, and Booze Nowhere A-tall." And in a great convention at
Waterloo he had helped organize the first regiment in Iowa of the
Anti-rum Minute Men.

The articles and editorials regarding him, in newspapers, house
organs, and one rubber-goods periodical, were accompanied by
photographs of himself, his buxom wife, and his eight bounding
daughters, depicted in Canadian winter costumes among snow and
icicles, in modest but easy athletic costumes, playing tennis in
the backyard, and in costumes of no known genus whatever, frying
bacon against a background of Northern Minnesota pines.

Martin felt strongly that he would like to get away and recover.

He walked back to the Sims House.  He realized that to a civilized
man the fact that Pickerbaugh advocated any reform would be
sufficient reason for ignoring it.

When he had gone thus far, Martin pulled himself up, cursed himself
for what he esteemed his old sin of superiority to decent normal
people. . . .  Failure.  Disloyalty.  In medical school, in private
practice, in his bullying health administration.  Now again?

He urged, "This pep and heartiness stuff of Pickerbaugh's is
exactly the thing to get across to the majority of people the
scientific discoveries of the Max Gottliebs.  What do I care how
much Pickerbaugh gases before conventions of Sunday School
superintendents and other morons, as long as he lets me do my work
in the lab and dairy inspection?"

He pumped up enthusiasm and came quite cheerfully and confidently
into the shabby, high-ceilinged hotel bedroom where Leora sat in a
rocker by the window.

"Well?" she said.

"It's fine--gave me fine welcome.  And they want us to come to
dinner tomorrow evening."

"What's he like?"

"Oh, he's awfully optimistic--he puts things over--he--  Oh, Leora,
am I going to be a sour, cranky, unpopular, rotten failure again?"

His head was buried in her lap and he clung to her affection, the
one reality in a world of chattering ghosts.


III


When the maples fluttered beneath their window in the breeze that
sprang up with the beginning of twilight, when the amiable citizens
of Nautilus had driven home to supper in their shaky Fords, Leora
had persuaded him that Pickerbaugh's flamboyance would not
interfere with his own work, that in any case they would not remain
in Nautilus forever, that he was impatient, and that she loved him
dearly.  So they descended to supper, an old-fashioned Iowa supper
with corn fritters and many little dishes which were of interest
after the loving but misinformed cooking of Leora, and they went to
the movies and held hands and were not ill content.

The next day Dr. Pickerbaugh was busier and less buoyant.  He gave
Martin a notion of the details of his work.

Martin had thought of himself, freed from tinkering over cut
fingers and ear-aches, as spending ecstatic days in the laboratory,
emerging only to battle with factory-owners who defied sanitation.
But he found that it was impossible to define his work, except that
he was to do a little of everything that Pickerbaugh, the press, or
any stray citizen of Nautilus might think of.

He was to placate voluble voters who came in to complain of
everything from the smell of sewer-gas to the midnight beer parties
of neighbors; he was to dictate office correspondence to the touchy
stenographer, who was not a Working Girl but a Nice Girl Who Was
Working; to give publicity to the newspapers; to buy paper-clips
and floor-wax and report-blanks at the lowest prices; to assist, in
need, the two part-time physicians in the city clinic; to direct
the nurses and the two sanitary inspectors; to scold the Garbage
Removal Company; to arrest--or at least to jaw at--all public
spitters; to leap into a Ford and rush out to tack placards on
houses in which were infectious diseases; to keep a learned
implacable eye on epidemics from Vladivostok to Patagonia, and to
prevent (by methods not very clearly outlined) their coming in to
slay the yeomanry and even halt the business activities of
Nautilus.

But there was a little laboratory work: milk tests, Wassermanns for
private physicians, the making of vaccines, cultures in suspected
diphtheria.

"I get it," said Leora, as they dressed for dinner at Pickerbaugh's.
"Your job will only take about twenty-eight hours a day, and the
rest of the time you're perfectly welcome to spend in research,
unless somebody interrupts you."


IV


The home of Dr. and Mrs. Almus Pickerbaugh, on the steeple-prickly
West Side, was a Real Old-Fashioned Home.  It was a wooden house
with towers, swings, hammocks, rather mussy shade trees, a rather
mangy lawn, a rather damp arbor, and an old carriage-house with a
line of steel spikes along the ridge pole.  Over the front gate was
the name:  UNEEDAREST.

Martin and Leora came into a shambles of salutations and daughters.
The eight girls, from pretty Orchid aged nineteen to the five-year-
old twins, surged up in a tidal wave of friendly curiosity and
tried to talk all at once.

Their hostess was a plump woman with an air of worried trustfulness.
Her conviction that everything was all right was constantly
struggling with her knowledge that a great many things seemed to be
all wrong.  She kissed Leora while Pickerbaugh was pump-handling
Martin.  Pickerbaugh had a way of pressing his thumb into the back
of your hand which was extraordinarily cordial and painful.

He immediately drowned out even his daughters by an oration on the
Home Nest:

"Here you've got an illustration of Health in the Home.  Look at
these great strapping girls, Arrowsmith!  Never been sick a day in
their lives--practically--and though Mother does have her sick-
headaches, that's to be attributed to the early neglect of her
diet, because while her father, the old deacon--and a fine
upstanding gentleman of the old school he was, too, if there ever
was one, and a friend of Nathaniel Mugford, to whom more than any
other we owe not only the foundation of Mugford College but also
the tradition of integrity and industry which have produced our
present prosperity--BUT he had no knowledge of diet or sanitation,
and I've always thought--"

The daughters were introduced as Orchid, Verbena, Daisy, Jonquil,
Hibisca, Narcissa, and the twins, Arbuta and Gladiola.

Mrs. Pickerbaugh sighed:

"I suppose it would be dreadfully conventional to call them My
Jewels--I do so hate these conventional phrases that everybody
uses, don't you?--but that's what they really are to their mother,
and the Doctor and I have sometimes wished--  Of course when we'd
started giving them floral names we had to keep it up, but if we'd
started with jewels, just think of all the darling names we might
have used, like Agate and Cameo and Sardonyx and Beryl and Topaz
and Opal and Esmeralda and Chrysoprase--it IS Chrysoprase, isn't
it, not Chrysalis?  Oh, well, many people have congratulated us on
their names as it is.  You know the girls are getting quite famous--
their pictures in so many papers, and we have a Pickerbaugh
Ladies' Baseball Team all our own--only the Doctor has to play on
it now, because I'm beginning to get a little stout."

Except by their ages, it was impossible to tell the daughters
apart.  They were all bouncing, all blond, all pretty, all eager,
all musical, and not merely pure but clamorously clean-minded.
They all belonged to the Congregational Sunday School, and to
either the Y.W.C.A. or the Camp Fire Girls; they were all fond of
picnicking; and they could all of them, except the five-year-old
twins, quote practically without error the newest statistics
showing the evils of alcohol.

"In fact," said Dr. Pickerbaugh, "WE think they're a very striking
brood of chickabiddies."

"They certainly are!" quivered Martin.

"But best of all, they are able to help me put over the doctrine of
the Mens Sana in the Corpus Sano.  Mrs. Pickerbaugh and I have
trained them to sing together, both in the home and publicly, and
as an organization we call them the Healthette Octette."

"Really?" said Leora, when it was apparent that Martin had passed
beyond speech.

"Yes, and before I get through with it I hope to popularize the
name Healthette from end to end of this old nation, and you're
going to see bands of happy young women going around spreading
their winged message into every dark corner.  Healthette Bands!
Beautiful and pure-minded and enthusiastic and good basket-ball
players!  I tell you, THEY'LL make the lazy and willful stir their
stumps!  They'll shame the filthy livers and filthy talkers into
decency!  I've already worked out a poem-slogan for the Healthette
Bands.  Would you like to hear it?"


Winsome young womanhood wins with a smile
Boozers, spitters, and gamblers from things that are vile.
Our parents and teachers have explained the cause of life,
So against the evil-minded we'll also make strife.
We'll shame them, reclaim them, from bad habits, you bet!
Better watch out, Mr. Loafer, I am a Healthette!


"But of course an even more important Cause is--and I was one of
the first to advocate it--having a Secretary of Health and Eugenics
in the cabinet at Washington--"

On the tide of this dissertation they were swept through a
stupendous dinner.  With a hearty "Nonsense, nonsense, man, of
course you want a second helping--this is Hospitality Hall!"
Pickerbaugh so stuffed Martin and Leora with roast duck, candied
sweet potatoes, and mince pie that they became dangerously ill and
sat glassy-eyed.  But Pickerbaugh himself did not seem to be
affected.  While he carved and gobbled, he went on discoursing till
the dining-room, with its old walnut buffet, its Hoffmann pictures
of Christ, and its Remington pictures of cowpunchers, seemed to
vanish, leaving him on a platform beside a pitcher of ice-water.

Not always was he merely fantastic.  "Dr. Arrowsmith, I tell you
we're lucky men to be able to get a living out of doing our honest
best to make the people in a he-town like this well and vital.  I
could be pulling down eight or ten thousand a year in private
practice, and I've been told I could make more than that in the art
of advertising, yet I'm glad, and my dear ones are glad with me, to
take a salary of four thousand.   Think of our having a job where
we've got nothing to sell but honesty and decency and the
brotherhood o' man!"

Martin perceived that Pickerbaugh meant it, and the shame of the
realization kept him from leaping up, seizing Leora, and catching
the first freight train out of Nautilus.

After dinner the younger daughters desired to love Leora, in
swarms.  Martin had to take the twins on his knees and tell them a
story.  They were remarkably heavy twins, but no heavier than the
labor of inventing a plot.  Before they went to bed, the entire
Healthette Octette sang the famous Health Hymn (written by Dr.
Almus Pickerbaugh) which Martin was to hear on so many bright and
active public occasions in Nautilus.  It was set to the tune of
"The Battle Hymn of the Republic," but as the twins' voices were
energetic and extraordinarily shrill, it had an effect all its own:


Oh, are you out for happiness or are you out for pelf?
You owe it to the grand old flag to cultivate yourself,
To train the mind, keep clean the streets, and ever guard your
health.

Then we'll all go marching on.

A healthy mind in A clean body,
A healthy mind in A clean body,
A healthy mind in A clean body,
The slogan for one and all.


As a bedtime farewell, the twins then recited, as they had recently
at the Congregational Festival, one of their father's minor lyrics:


What does little birdie say
On the sill at break o' day?
"Hurrah for health in Nautilus
For Pa and Ma and all of us,
Hurray, hurray, hurray!"


"There, my popsywopsies, up to bed we go!" said Mrs. Pickerbaugh.
"Don't you think, Mrs. Arrowsmith, they're natural-born actresses?
They're not afraid of any audience, and the way they throw
themselves into it--perhaps not Broadway, but the more refined
theaters in New York would just love them, and maybe they've been
sent to us to elevate the drama.  Upsy go."

During her absence the others gave a brief musical program.

Verbena, the second oldest, played Chaminade.  ("Of course we all
love music, and popularize it among the neighbors, but Verby is
perhaps the only real musical genius in the family.")  But the
unexpected feature was Orchid's cornet solo.

Martin dared not look at Leora.  It was not that he was sniffily
superior to cornet solos, for in Elk Mills, Wheatsylvania, and
surprisingly large portions of Zenith, cornet solos were done by
the most virtuous females.  But he felt that he had been in a
madhouse for dozens of years.

"I've never been so drunk in my life.  I wish I could get at a
drink and sober up," he agonized.  He made hysterical and
completely impractical plans for escape.  Then Mrs. Pickerbaugh,
returning from the still audible twins, sat down at the harp.

While she played, a faded woman and thickish, she fell into a great
dreaming, and suddenly Martin had a picture of her as a gay, good,
dove-like maiden who had admired the energetic young medical
student, Almus Pickerbaugh.  She must have been a veritable girl of
the late eighties and the early nineties, the naive and idyllic age
of Howells, when young men were pure, when they played croquet and
sang Swanee River; a girl who sat on a front porch enchanted by the
sweetness of lilacs, and hoped that when Almus and she were married
they would have a nickel-plated baseburner stove and a son who
would become a missionary or a millionaire.

For the first time that evening, Martin managed to put a
respectable heartiness into his "Enjoyed that s' much."  He felt
victorious, and somewhat recovered from his weakness.  But the
evening's orgy was only begun.

They played word-games, which Martin hated and Leora did very badly
indeed.  They acted charades, at which Pickerbaugh was tremendous.
The sight of him on the floor in his wife's fur coat, being a seal
on an ice-floe, was incomparable.  Then Martin, Orchid, and Hibisca
(aged twelve) had to present a charade, and there were complications.

Orchid was as full of simple affections, of smilings and pattings
and bouncings, as her younger sisters, but she was nineteen and not
altogether a child.  Doubtless she was as pure-minded and as
devoted to Clean and Wholesome Novels as Dr. Pickerbaugh stated,
and he stated it with frequency, but she was not unconscious of
young men, even though they were married.

She planned to enact the word doleful, with a beggar asking a dole,
and a corncrib full.  As they skipped upstairs to dress, she hugged
Martin's arm, frisked beside him, and murmured, "Oh, Doctor, I'm so
glad Daddy has you for assistant--somebody that's young and good-
looking.  Oh, was that dreadful of me?  But I mean: you look so
athletic and everything, and the other assistant director--don't
tell Daddy I said so, but he was an old crank!"

He was conscious of brown eyes and unshadowed virginal lips.  As
Orchid put on her agreeably loose costume as a beggar, he was also
conscious of ankles and young bosom.  She smiled at him, as one who
had long known him, and said loyally, "We'll show 'em!  I know
you're a dan-dy actor!"

When they bustled downstairs, as she did not take his arm, he took
hers, and he pressed it slightly and felt alarmed and relinquished
it with emphasis.

Since his marriage he had been so absorbed in Leora, as lover, as
companion, as helper, that till this hour his most devastating
adventure had been a glance at a pretty girl in a train.  But the
flushed young gaiety of Orchid disturbed him.  He wanted to be rid
of her, he hoped that he would not be altogether rid of her, and
for the first time in years he was afraid of Leora's eyes.

There were acrobatic feats later, and a considerable prominence of
Orchid, who did not wear stays, who loved dancing, and who praised
Martin's feats in the game of "Follow the Leader."

All the daughters save Orchid were sent to bed, and the rest of
the fete consisted of what Pickerbaugh called "a little quiet
scientific conversation by the fireside," made up of his
observations on good roads, rural sanitation, Ideals in politics,
and methods of letter filing in health departments.  Through this
placid hour, or it may have been an hour and a half, Martin saw
that Orchid was observing his hair, his jaw, his hands, and he had,
and dismissed, and had again a thought about the innocent
agreeableness of holding her small friendly paw.

He also saw that Leora was observing both of them, and he suffered
a good deal, and had practically no benefit whatever from
Pickerbaugh's notes on the value of disinfectants.  When
Pickerbaugh predicted for Nautilus, in fifteen years, a health
department thrice as large, with many full-time clinic and school
physicians and possibly Martin as director (Pickerbaugh himself
having gone off to mysterious and interesting activities in a
Larger Field), Martin merely croaked, "Yes, that'd be--be fine,"
while to himself he was explaining, "Damn that girl, I wish she
wouldn't shake herself at me."

At half-past eight he had pictured his escape as life's highest
ecstasy; at twelve he took leave with nervous hesitation.

They walked to the hotel.  Free from the sight of Orchid, brisk in
the coolness, he forgot the chit and pawed again the problem of his
work in Nautilus.

"Lord, I don't know whether I can do it.  To work under that gas-
bag, with his fool pieces about boozers--"

"They weren't so bad," protested Leora.

"Bad?  Why, he's probably the worst poet that ever lived, and he
certainly knows less about epidemiology than I thought any one man
could ever learn, all by himself.  But when it comes to this--what
was it Clif Clawson used to call it?--by the way, wonder what's
ever become of Clif; haven't heard from him for a couple o' years--
when it comes to this 'overpowering Christian Domesticity'--  Oh,
let's hunt for a blind-pig and sit around with the nice restful
burglars."

She insisted, "I thought his poems were kind of cute."

"Cute!  What a word!"

"It's no worse than the cuss-words you're always using!  But the
cornet yowling by that awful oldest daughter--  Ugh!"

"Well, now she played darn' well!"

"Martin, the cornet is the kind of instrument my brother would
play.  And you so superior about the doctor's poetry and my saying
'cute'!  You're just as much a backwoods hick as I am, and maybe
more so!"

"Why, gee, Leora, I never knew you to get sore about nothing
before!  And can't you understand how important--  You see, a man
like Pickerbaugh makes all public health work simply ridiculous by
his circusing and his ignorance.  If he said that fresh air was a
good thing, instead of making me open my windows it'd make me or
any other reasonable person close 'em.  And to use the word
'science' in those flop-eared limericks or whatever you call 'em--
it's sacrilege!"

"Well, if you want to KNOW, Martin Arrowsmith, I'll have no more of
these high jinks with that Orchid girl!  Practically hugging her
when you came downstairs, and then mooning at her all evening!  I
don't mind your cursing and being cranky and even getting drunk, in
a reasonable sort of way, but ever since the lunch when you told me
and that Fox woman, 'I hope you girls won't mind, but I just happen
to remember that I'm engaged to both of you'--  You're mine, and I
won't have any trespassers.  I'm a cavewoman, and you'd better
learn it, and as for that Orchid, with her simper and her stroking
your arm and her great big absurd feet--  Orchid!  She's no orchid!
She's a bachelor's button!"

"But, honest, I don't even remember which of the eight she was."

"Huh!  Then you've been making love to all of 'em, that's why.
Drat her!  Well, I'm not going to go on scrapping about it.  I just
wanted to warn you, that's all."

At the hotel, after giving up the attempt to find a short, jovial,
convincing way of promising that he would never flirt with Orchid,
he stammered, "If you don't mind, I think I'll stay down and walk a
little more.  I've got to figure this health department business
out."

He sat in the Sims House office--singularly dismal it was, after
midnight, and singularly smelly.

"That fool Pickerbaugh!  I wish I'd told him right out that we know
hardly anything about the epidemiology of tuberculosis, for
instance.

"Just the same, she's a darling child.  Orchid!  She's like an
orchid--no, she's too healthy.  Be a great kid to go hunting with.
Sweet.  And she acted as if I were her own age, not an old doctor.
I'll be good, oh, I'll be good, but--I'd like to kiss her once,
GOOD!  She likes me.  Those darling lips, like--like rosebuds!

"Poor Leora.  I nev' was so astonished in my life.  Jealous.  Well,
she's got a right to be!  No woman ever stood by a man like--Lee,
sweet, can't you see, idiot, if I skipped round the corner with
seventeen billion Orchids, it'd be you I loved, and never anybody
but you!

"I can't go round singing Healthette Octette Pantalette stuff.
Even if it did instruct people, which it don't.  Be almost better
to let 'em die than have to live and listen to--

"Leora said I was a 'backwoods hick.'  Let me tell you, young
woman, as it happens I am a Bachelor of Arts, and you may recall
the kind of books the 'backwoods hick' was reading to you last
winter, and even Henry James and everybody and--  Oh, she's right.
I am.  I do know how to make pipets and agar, but--  And yet some
day I want to travel like Sondelius--

"Sondelius!  God!  If it were he I was working for, instead of
Pickerbaugh, I'd slave for him--

"Or does he pull the bunk, too?

"Now that's just what I mean.  That kind of phrase.  'Pull the
bunk'!  Horrible!

"Hell!  I'll use any kind of phrase I want to!  I'm not one of your
social climbers like Angus.  The way Sondelius cusses, for
instance, and yet he's used to all those highbrows--

"And I'll be so busy here in Nautilus that I won't even be able to
go on reading.  Still--  I don't suppose they read much, but there
must be quite a few of these rich men here that know about nice
houses.  Clothes.  Theaters.  That stuff.

"Rats!"

He wandered to an all-night lunch-wagon, where he gloomily drank
coffee.  Beside him, seated at the long shelf which served as
table, beneath the noble red-glass window with a portrait of George
Washington, was a policeman who, as he gnawed a Hamburger sandwich,
demanded:

"Say, ain't you this new doctor that's come to assist Pickerbaugh?
Seen you at City Hall."

"Yes.  Say, uh, say, how does the city like Pickerbaugh?  How do
you like him?  Tell me honestly, because I'm just starting in, and,
uh--  You get me."

With his spoon held inside the cup by a brawny thumb, the policeman
gulped his coffee and proclaimed, while the greasy friendly cook of
the lunch-wagon nodded in agreement:

"Well, if you want the straight dope, he hollers a good deal, but
he's one awful brainy man.  He certainly can sling the Queen's
English, and jever hear one of his poems?  They're darn' bright.
I'll tell you:  There's some people say Pickerbaugh pulls the song
and dance too much, but way I figure it, course maybe for you and
me, Doctor, it'd be all right if he just looked after the milk and
the garbage and the kids' teeth.  But there's a lot of careless,
ignorant, foreign slobs that need to be jollied into using their
konks about these health biznai, so's they won't go getting sick
with a lot of these infectious diseases and pass 'em on to the rest
of us, and believe me, old Doc Pickerbaugh is the boy that gets the
idea into their noodles!

"Yes, sir, he's a great old coot--he ain't a clam like some of
these docs.  Why, say, one day he showed up at the St. Patrick
picnic, even if he is a dirty Protestant, and him and Father
Costello chummed up like two old cronies, and darn' if he didn't
wrestle a fellow half his age, and awful' near throw him, yes, you
bet he did, he certainly give that young fellow a run for his money
all right!  We fellows on the Force all like him, and we have to
grin, the way he comes around and soft-soaps us into doing a lot of
health work that by law we ain't hardly supposed to do, you might
say, instead of issuing a lot of fool orders.  You bet.  He's a
real guy."

"I see," said Martin, and as he returned to the hotel he meditated:

"But think of what Gottlieb would say about him.

"Damn Gottlieb!  Damn everybody except Leora!

"I'm not going to fail here, way I did in Wheatsylvania.

"Some day Pickerbaugh will get a bigger job--  Huh!  He's just the
kind of jollying fourflusher that WOULD climb!  But anyway, I'll
have my training then, and maybe I'll make a real health department
here.

"Orchid said we'd go skating this winter--

"DAMN Orchid!"




Chapter 20



Martin found in Dr. Pickerbaugh a generous chief.  He was eager to
have Martin invent and clamor about his own Causes and Movements.
His scientific knowledge was rather thinner than that of the
visiting nurses, but he had little jealousy, and he demanded of
Martin only the belief that a rapid and noisy moving from place to
place is the means (and possibly the end) of Progress.

In a two-family house on Social Hill, which is not a hill but a
slight swelling in the plain, Martin and Leora found an upper
floor.  There was a simple pleasantness in these continuous lawns,
these wide maple-shaded streets, and a joy in freedom from the
peering whispers of Wheatsylvania.

Suddenly they were being courted by the Nice Society of Nautilus.

A few days after their arrival Martin was summoned to the telephone
to hear a masculine voice rasping:

"Hello.  Martin?  I bet you can't guess who this is!"

Martin, very busy, restrained his desire to observe, "You win--
g' by!" and he buzzed, with the cordiality suitable to a new
Assistant Director:

"No, I'm afraid I can't."

"Well, make a guess."

"Oh--Clif Clawson?"

"Nope.  Say, I see you're looking fine.  Oh, I guess I've got you
guessing this time!  Go on!  Have another try!"

The stenographer was waiting to take letters, and Martin had not
yet learned to become impersonal and indifferent in her presence.
He said with a perceptible tartness:

"Oh, I suppose it's President Wilson.  Look here--"

"Well, Mart, it's Irve Watters!  What do you know about that!"

Apparently the jester expected large gratification, but it took ten
seconds for Martin to remember who Irving Watters might be.  Then
he had it:  Watters, the appalling normal medical student whose
faith in the good, the true, the profitable, had annoyed him at
Digamma Pi.  He made his response as hearty as he could:

"Well, well, what you doing here, Irve?"

"Why, I'm settled here.  Been here ever since internship.  And got
a nice little practice, too.  Look, Mart, Mrs. Watters and I want
you and your wife--I believe you are married, aren't you?--to come
up to the house for dinner, tomorrow evening, and I'll put you onto
all the local slants."

The dread of Watters's patronage enabled Martin to lie vigorously:

"Awfully sorry--awfully sorry--got a date for tomorrow evening and
the next evening."

"Then come have lunch with me tomorrow at the Elks' Club, and you
and your wife take dinner with us Sunday noon."

Hopelessly, "I don't think I can make it for lunch but--  Well,
we'll dine with you Sunday."

It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting
than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were
friends.  Martin's imaginative dismay at being caught here by
Watters was not lessened when Leora and he reluctantly appeared on
Sunday at one-thirty and were by a fury of Old Friendship dragged
back into the days of Digamma Pi.

Watters's house was new, and furnished in a highly built-in and
leaded-glass manner.  He had in three years of practice already
become didactic and incredibly married; he had put on weight and
infallibility; and he had learned many new things about which to be
dull.  Having been graduated a year earlier than Martin and having
married an almost rich wife, he was kind and hospitable with an
emphasis which aroused a desire to do homicide.  His conversation
was a series of maxims and admonitions:

"If you stay with the Department of Public Health for a couple of
years and take care to meet the right people, you'll be able to go
into very lucrative practice here.  It's a fine town--prosperous--
so few dead beats.

"You want to join the country club and take up golf.  Best
opportunity in the world to meet the substantial citizens.  I've
picked up more than one high-class patient there.

"Pickerbaugh is a good active man and a fine booster but he's got a
bad socialistic tendency.  These clinics--outrageous--the people
that go to them that can afford to pay!  Pauperize people.  Now
this may startle you--oh, you had a lot of crank notions when you
were in school, but you aren't the only one that does some thinking
for himself!--sometimes I believe it'd be better for the general
health situation if there weren't any public health departments at
all, because they get a lot of people into the habit of going to
free clinics instead of to private physicians, and cut down the
earnings of the doctors and reduce their number, so there are less
of us to keep a watchful eye on sickness.

"I guess by this time you've gotten over the funny ideas you used
to have about being practical--'commercialism' you used to call it.
You can see now that you've got to support your wife and family,
and if you don't, nobody else is going to.

"Any time you want a straight tip about people here, you just come
to me.  Pickerbaugh is a crank--he won't give you the right dope--
the people you want to tie up with are the good, solid,
conservative, successful business men."

Then Mrs. Watters had her turn.  She was meaty with advice, being
the daughter of a prosperous person, none other than Mr. S. A.
Peaseley, the manufacturer of the Daisy Manure Spreader.

"You haven't any children?" she sobbed at Leora.  "Oh, you must!
Irving and I have two, and you don't know what an interest they are
to us, and they keep us so young."

Martin and Leora looked at each other pitifully.

After dinner, Irving insisted on their recalling the "good times we
used to have together at the dear old U."  He took no denial.  "You
always want to make folks think you're eccentric, Mart.  You
pretend you haven't any college patriotism, but I know better--I
know you're showing off--you admire the old place and our profs
just as much as anybody.  Maybe I know you better than you do
yourself!  Come on, now; let's give a long cheer and sing
'Winnemac, Mother of Brawny Men.'"

And, "Don't be silly; of course you're going to sing," said Mrs.
Watters, as she marched to the piano, with which she dealt in a
firm manner.

When they had politely labored through the fried chicken and brick
ice cream, through the maxims, gurglings and memories, Martin and
Leora went forth and spoke in tongues:

"Pickerbaugh must be a saint, if Watters roasts him.  I begin to
believe he has sense enough to come in when it rains."

In their common misery they forgot that they had been agitated by a
girl named Orchid.


II


Between Pickerbaugh and Irving Watters, Martin was drafted into
many of the associations, clubs, lodges, and "causes" with which
Nautilus foamed; into the Chamber of Commerce, the Moccasin Ski and
Hiking Club, the Elks' Club, the Odd Fellows, and the Evangeline
County Medical society.  He resisted, but they said in a high hurt
manner, "Why, my boy, if you're going to be a public official, and
if you have the slightest appreciation of their efforts to make you
welcome here--"

Leora and he found themselves with so many invitations that they,
who had deplored the dullness of Wheatsylvania, complained now that
they could have no quiet evenings at home.  But they fell into the
habit of social ease, of dressing, of going places without nervous
anticipation.  They modernized their rustic dancing; they learned
to play bridge, rather badly, and tennis rather well; and Martin,
not by virtue and heroism but merely by habit, got out of the way
of resenting the chirp of small talk.

Probably they were never recognized by their hostesses as pirates,
but considered a Bright Young Couple who, since they were proteges
of Pickerbaugh, must be earnest and forward-looking, and who, since
they were patronized by Irving and Mrs. Watters, must be
respectable.

Watters took them in hand and kept them there.  He had so thick a
rind that it was impossible for him to understand that Martin's
frequent refusals of his invitations could conceivably mean that he
did not wish to come.  He detected traces of heterodoxy in Martin,
and with affection, diligence, and an extraordinarily heavy humor
he devoted himself to the work of salvation.  Frequently he sought
to entertain other guests by urging, "Come on now, Mart, let's hear
some of those crazy ideas of yours!"

His friendly zeal was drab compared with that of his wife.  Mrs.
Watters had been reared by her father and by her husband to believe
that she was the final fruit of the ages, and she set herself to
correct the barbarism of the Arrowsmiths.  She rebuked Martin's
damns, Leora's smoking, and both their theories of bidding at
bridge.  But she never nagged.  To have nagged would have been to
admit that there were persons who did not acknowledge her
sovereignty.  She merely gave orders, brief, humorous, and
introduced by a strident "Now don't be silly," and she expected
that to settle the matter.

Martin groaned, "Oh, Lord, between Pickerbaugh and Irve, it's
easier to become a respectable member of society than to go on
fighting."

But Watters and Pickerbaugh were not so great a compulsion to
respectability as the charms of finding himself listened to in
Nautilus as he never had been in Wheatsylvania, and of finding
himself admired by Orchid.


III


He had been seeking a precipitation test for the diagnosis of
syphilis which should be quicker and simpler than the Wassermann.
His slackened fingers and rusty mind were becoming used to the
laboratory and to passionate hypotheses when he was dragged away to
help Pickerbaugh in securing publicity.  He was coaxed into making
his first speech: an address on "What the Laboratory Teaches about
Epidemics" for the Sunday Afternoon Free Lecture Course of the Star
of Hope Universalist Church.

He was flustered when he tried to prepare his notes, and on the
morning of the affair he was chill as he remembered the dreadful
thing he would do this day, but he was desperate with embarrassment
when he came up to the Star of Hope Church.

People were crowding in; mature, responsible people.  He quaked,
"They're coming to hear ME, and I haven't got a darn' thing to say
to 'em!"  It made him feel the more ridiculous that they who
presumably wished to listen to him should not be aware of him, and
that the usher, profusely shaking hands at the Byzantine portal,
should bluster, "You'll find plenty room right up the side aisles,
young man."

"I'm the speaker for the afternoon."

"Oh, oh, yes, oh, yes, Doctor.  Right round to the Bevis Street
entrance, if you please, Doctor."

In the parlors he was unctuously received by the pastor and a
committee of three, wearing morning clothes and a manner of
Christian intellectuality.

They held his hand in turn, they brought up rustling women to meet
him, they stood about him in a polite and twittery circle, and
dismayingly they expected him to say something intelligent.  Then,
suffering, ghastly frightened, dumb, he was led through an arched
doorway into the auditorium.  Millions of faces were staring at his
apologetic insignificance--faces in the curving lines of pews,
faces in the low balcony, eyes which followed him and doubted him
and noted that his heels were run down.

The agony grew while he was prayed over and sung over.

The pastor and the lay chairman of the Lecture Course opened with
suitable devotions.  While Martin trembled and tried to look
brazenly at the massed people who were looking at him, while he sat
nude and exposed and unprotected on the high platform, the pastor
made announcement of the Thursday Missionary Supper and the Little
Lads' Marching Club.  They sang a brief cheerful hymn or two--
Martin wondering whether to sit or stand--and the chairman prayed
that "our friend who will address us today may have power to put
his Message across."  Through the prayer Martin sat with his
forehead in his hand, feeling foolish, and raving, "I guess this is
the proper attitude--they're all gawping at me--gosh, won't he ever
quit?--oh, damn it, now what was that point I was going to make
about fumigation?--oh, Lord, he's winding up and I've got to
shoot!"

Somehow, he was standing by the reading-desk, holding it for
support, and his voice seemed to be going on, producing reasonable
words.  The blur of faces cleared and he saw individuals.  He
picked out a keen old man and tried to make him laugh and marvel.

He found Leora, toward the back, nodding to him, reassuring him.
He dared to look away from the path of faces directly in front of
him.  He glanced at the balcony--

The audience perceived a young man who was being earnest about sera
and vaccines but, while his voice buzzed on, that churchly young
man had noted two silken ankles distinguishing the front row of the
balcony, had discovered that they belonged to Orchid Pickerbaugh
and that she was flashing down admiration.

At the end Martin had the most enthusiastic applause ever known--
all lecturers, after all lectures, are gratified by that kind of
applause--and the chairman said the most flattering things ever
uttered, and the audience went out with the most remarkable speed
ever witnessed, and Martin discovered himself holding Orchid's hand
in the parlors while she warbled, in the most adorable voice ever
heard, "Oh, Dr. Arrowsmith, you were just wonderful!  Most of these
lecturers are old stuffs, but you put it right over!  I'm going to
do a dash home and tell Dad.  He'll be so tickled!"

Not till then did he find that Leora had made her way to the
parlors and was looking at them like a wife.

As they walked home Leora was eloquently silent.

"Well, did you like my spiel?" he said, after a suitable time of
indignant waiting.

"Yes, it wasn't bad.  It must have been awfully hard to talk to all
those stupid people."

"Stupid?  What d'you mean by 'stupid'?  They got me splendidly.
They were fine."

"Were they?  Well anyway, thank Heaven, you won't have to keep up
this silly gassing.  Pickerbaugh likes to hear himself talk too
well to let you in on it very often."

"I didn't mind it.  Fact, don't know but what it's a good thing to
have to express myself publicly now and then.  Makes you think more
lucidly."

"As for instance the nice, lovely, lucid politicians!"

"Now you look here, Lee!  Of course we know your husband is a mutt,
and no good outside the laboratory, but I do think you might
PRETEND to be a little enthusiastic over the first address he's
ever made--the very first he's ev-er tackled--when it went off so
well."

"Why, silly, I was enthusiastic.  I applauded a lot.  I thought you
were terribly smart.  It's just--  There's other things I think you
can do better.  What shall we do tonight; have a cold snack at home
or go to the cafeteria?"

Thus was he reduced from hero to husband, and he had all the
pleasures of inappreciation.

He thought about his indignities the whole week, but with the
coming of winter there was a fever of dully sprightly dinners and
safely wild bridge and their first evening at home, their first
opportunity for secure and comfortable quarreling, was on Friday.
They sat down to what he announced as "getting back to some real
reading, like physiology and a little of this fellow Arnold
Bennett--nice quiet reading," but which consisted of catching up on
the news notes in the medical journals.

He was restless.  He threw down his magazine.  He demanded:

"What're you going to wear at Pickerbaugh's snow picnic tomorrow?"

"Oh, I haven't--  I'll find something."

"Lee, I want to ask you:  Why the devil did you say I talked too
much at Dr. Strafford's last evening?  I know I've got most of the
faults going, but I didn't know talking too much was one of 'em."

"It hasn't been, till now."

"'Till now'!"

"You look here, Sandy Arrowsmith!  You've been pouting like a bad
brat all week.  What's the matter with you?"

"Well, I--  Gosh, it makes me tired!  Here everybody is so
enthusiastic about my Star of Hope spiel--that note in the Morning
Frontiersman, and Pickerbaugh says Orchid said it was a corker--and
you never so much as peep!"

"Didn't I applaud?  But--  It's just that I hope you aren't going
to keep up this drooling."

"You do, do you!  Well, let me tell you I AM going to keep it up!
Not that I'm going to talk a lot of hot air.  I gave 'em straight
science, last Sunday, and they ate it up.  I hadn't realized it
isn't necessary to be mushy, to hold an audience.  And the amount
of good you can do!  Why, I got across more Health Instruction and
ideas about the value of the lab in that three-quarters of an hour
than--  I don't care for being a big gun but it's fine to have
people where they have to listen to what you've got to say and
can't butt in, way they did in Wheatsylvania.  You bet I'm going to
keep up what you so politely call my damn' fool drooling--"

"Sandy, it may be all right for some people, but not for you.  I
can't tell you--that's one reason I haven't said more about your
talk--I can't tell you how astonished I am to hear you, who're
always sneering at what you call sentimentality, simply weeping
over the Dear Little Tots!"

"I never said that--never used the phrase and you know it.  And by
God!  YOU talk about sneering!  Just let me tell you that the
Public Health Movement, by correcting early faults in children, by
looking after their eyes and tonsils and so on, can save millions
of lives and make a future generation--"

"I know it!  I love children much more than you do!  But I mean all
this ridiculous simpering--"

"Well, gosh, somebody has to do it.  You can't work with people
till you educate 'em.  There's where old Pick, even if he is an
imbecile, does such good work with his poems and all that stuff.
Prob'ly be a good thing if I could write 'em--golly, wonder if I
couldn't learn to?"

"They're horrible!"

"Now there's a fine consistency for you!  The other evening you
called 'em 'cute.'"

"I don't have to be consistent.  I'm a mere woman.  You, Martin
Arrowsmith, you'd be the first to tell me so.  And for Dr.
Pickerbaugh they're all right, but not for you.  You belong in a
laboratory, finding out things, not advertising them.  Do you
remember once in Wheatsylvania for five minutes you almost thought
of joining a church and being a Respectable Citizen?  Are you going
on for the rest of your life, stumbling into respectability and
having to be dug out again?  Will you never learn you're a
barbarian?"

"By God, I am!  And--what was that other lovely thing you called
me?--I'm also, soul of my soul, a damn' backwoods hick!  And a fine
lot you help!  When I want to settle down to a decent and useful
life and not go 'round antagonizing people, you, the one that ought
to believe in me, you're the first one to crab!"

"Maybe Orchid Pickerbaugh would help you better."

"She probably would!  Believe me, she's a darling, and she did
appreciate my spiel at the church, and if you think I'm going to
sit up all night listening to you sneering at my work and my
friends--  I'm going to have a hot bath.  Good NIGHT!"

In the bath he gasped that it was impossible he should have been
quarreling with Leora.  Why!  She was the only person in the world,
besides Gottlieb and Sondelius and Clif Clawson--by the way, where
was Clif? still in New York? didn't Clif owe him a letter? but
anyway--  He was a fool to have lost his temper, even if she was so
stubborn that she wouldn't adjust her opinions, couldn't see that
he had a gift for influencing people.  Nobody would ever stand by
him as she had, and he loved her--

He dried himself violently; he dashed in with repentances; they
told each other that they were the most reasonable persons living;
they kissed with eloquence; and then Leora reflected:

"Just the same, my lad, I'm not going to help you fool yourself.
You're not a booster.  You're a lie-hunter.  Funny, you'd think to
hear about these lie-hunters, like Professor Gottlieb and your old
Voltaire, they couldn't be fooled.  But maybe they were like you:
always trying to get away from the tiresome truth, always hoping to
settle down and be rich, always selling their souls to the devil
and then going and doublecrossing the poor devil.  I think--I
think--"  She sat up in bed, holding her temples in the labor of
articulation.  "You're different from Professor Gottlieb.  He never
makes mistakes or wastes time on--"

"He wasted time at Hunziker's nostrum factory all right, and his
title is 'Doctor,' not 'Professor,' if you MUST give him a--"

"If he went to Hunziker's he had some good reason.  He's a genius;
he couldn't be wrong.  Or could he, even he?  But ANYWAY: you,
Sandy, you have to stumble every so often; have to learn by making
mistakes.  I will say one thing: you learn from your crazy
mistakes.  But I get a little tired, sometimes, watching you rush
up and put your neck in every noose--like being a blinking orator
or yearning over your Orchid."

"Well, by golly!  After I come in here trying to make peace!  It's
a good thing YOU never make any mistakes!  But one perfect person
in a household is enough!"

He banged into bed.  Silence.  Soft sounds of "Mart--SANDY!"  He
ignored her, proud that he could be hard with her, and so fell
asleep.  At breakfast, when he was ashamed and eager, she was curt.

"I don't care to discuss it," she said.

In that wry mood they went on Saturday afternoon to the Pickerbaughs'
snow picnic.


IV


Dr. Pickerbaugh owned a small log cabin in a scanty grove of oaks
among the hillocks north of Nautilus.  A dozen of them drove out in
a bob-sled filled with straw and blue woolly robes.  The sleigh
bells were exciting and the children leaped out to run beside the
sled.

The school physician, a bachelor, was attentive to Leora; twice he
tucked her in, and that, for Nautilus, was almost compromising.  In
jealousy Martin turned openly and completely to Orchid.

He grew interested in her not for the sake of disciplining Leora
but for her own rosy sweetness.  She was wearing a tweed jacket,
with a tam, a flamboyant scarf, and the first breeches any girl had
dared to display in Nautilus.  She patted Martin's knee, and when
they rode behind the sled on a perilous toboggan, she held his
waist, resolutely.

She was calling him "Dr. Martin" now, and he had come to a warm
"Orchid."

At the cabin there was a clamor of disembarkation.  Together Martin
and Orchid carried in the hamper of food; together they slid down
the hillocks on skiis.  When their skiis were entangled, they
rolled into a drift, and as she clung to him, unafraid and
unembarrassed, it seemed to him that in the roughness of tweeds she
was but the softer and more wonderful--eyes fearless, cheeks
brilliant as she brushed the coating of wet snow from them, flying
legs of a slim boy, shoulders adorable in their pretense of sturdy
boyishness--

But "I'm a sentimental fool!  Leora was right!" he snarled at
himself.  "I thought you had some originality!  And poor little
Orchid--she'd be shocked if she knew how sneak-minded you are!"

But poor little Orchid was coaxing, "Come on, Dr. Martin, let's
shoot off that high bluff.  We're the only ones that have any pep."

"That's because we're the only young ones."

"It's because you're so young.  I'm dreadfully old.  I just sit and
moon when you rave about your epidemics and things."

He saw that, with her infernal school physician, Leora was sliding
on a distant slope.  It may have been pique and it may have been
relief that he was licensed to be alone with Orchid, but he ceased
to speak to her as though she were a child and he a person laden
with wisdom; ceased to speak to her as though he were looking over
his shoulder.  They raced to the high bluff.  They skied down it
and fell; they had one glorious swooping slide, and wrestled in the
snow.

They returned to the cabin together, to find the others away.  She
stripped off her wet sweater and patted her soft blouse.  They
ferreted out a thermos of hot coffee, and he looked at her as
though he was going to kiss her, and she looked back at him as
though she did not mind.  As they laid out the food they hummed
with the intimacy of understanding, and when she trilled, "Now
hurry up, lazy one, and put those cups on that horrid old table,"
it was as one who was content to be with him forever.

They said nothing compromising, they did not hold hands, and as
they rode home in the electric snow-flying darkness, though they
sat shoulder by shoulder he did not put his arms about her except
when the bob-sled slewed on sharp corners.  If Martin was exalted
with excitement, it was presumably caused by the wholesome
exercises of the day.  Nothing happened and nobody looked uneasy.
At parting all their farewells were cheery and helpful.

And Leora made no comments, though for a day or two there was about
her a chill air which the busy Martin did not investigate.




Chapter 21



Nautilus was one of the first communities in the country to develop
the Weeks habit, now so richly grown that we have Correspondence
School Week, Christian Science Week, Osteopathy Week, and Georgia
Pine Week.

A Week is not merely a week.

If an aggressive, wide-awake, live-wire, and go-ahead church or
chamber of commerce or charity desires to improve itself, which
means to get more money, it calls in those few energetic spirits
who run any city, and proclaims a Week.  This consists of one month
of committee meetings, a hundred columns of praise for the
organization in the public prints, and finally a day or two on
which athletic persons flatter inappreciative audiences in churches
or cinema theaters, and the prettiest girls in town have the
pleasure of being allowed to talk to male strangers on the street
corners, apropos of giving them extremely undecorative tags in
exchange for the smallest sums which those strangers think they
must pay if they are to be considered gentlemen.

The only variation is the Weeks in which the object is not to
acquire money immediately by the sale of tags but by general
advertising to get more of it later.

Nautilus had held a Pep Week, during which a race of rapidly
talking men, formerly book-agents but now called Efficiency
Engineers, went about giving advice to shopkeepers on how to get
money away from one another more rapidly, and Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh
addressed a prayer-meeting on "The Pep of St. Paul, the First
Booster."  It had held a Glad-hand Week, when everybody was
supposed to speak to at least three strangers daily, to the end
that infuriated elderly traveling salesmen were back-slapped all
day long by hearty and powerful unknown persons.  There had also
been an Old Home Week, a Write to Mother Week, a We Want Your
Factory in Nautilus Week, an Eat More Corn Week, a Go to Church
Week, a Salvation Army Week, and an Own Your Own Auto Week.

Perhaps the bonniest of all was Y. Week, to raise eighty thousand
dollars for a new Y.M.C.A. building.

On the old building were electric signs, changed daily, announcing
"You Must Come Across," "Young Man Come Along" and "Your Money
Creates 'Appiness."  Dr. Pickerbaugh made nineteen addresses in
three days, comparing the Y.M.C.A. to the Crusaders, the Apostles,
and the expeditions of Dr. Cook--who, he believed, really had
discovered the North Pole.  Orchid sold three hundred and nineteen
Y. tags, seven of them to the same man, who afterward made improper
remarks to her.  She was rescued by a Y.M.C.A. secretary, who for a
considerable time held her hand to calm her.

No organization could rival Almus Pickerbaugh in the invention of
Weeks.

He started in January with a Better Babies Week, and a very good
Week it was, but so hotly followed by Banish the Booze Week,
Tougher Teeth Week, and Stop the Spitter Week that people who
lacked his vigor were heard groaning, "My health is being ruined by
all this fretting over health."

During Clean-up Week, Pickerbaugh spread abroad a new lyric of his
own composition:


Germs come by stealth
And ruin health,
So listen, pard,
Just drop a card
To some man who'll clean up your yard
And that will hit the old germs hard.


Swat the Fly Week brought him, besides the joy of giving prizes to
the children who had slaughtered the most flies, the inspiration
for two verses.  Posters admonished:


Sell your hammer and buy a horn,
But hang onto the old fly-swatter.
If you don't want disease sneaking into the Home
Then to kill the fly you gotter!


It chanced that the Fraternal Order of Eagles were holding a state
convention at Burlington that week, and Pickerbaugh telegraphed to
them:


Just mention fly-prevention
At the good old Eagles' convention.


This was quoted in ninety-six newspapers, including one in Alaska,
and waving the clippings Pickerbaugh explained to Martin, "Now you
see the way a fellow can get the truth across, if he goes at it
right."

Three Cigars a Day Week, which Pickerbaugh invented in midsummer,
was not altogether successful, partly because an injudicious
humorist on a local newspaper wanted to know whether Dr.
Pickerbaugh really expected all babes in arms to smoke as many as
three cigars a day, and partly because the cigar-manufacturers came
around to the Department of Health with strong remarks about Common
Sense.  Nor was there thorough satisfaction in Can the Cat and
Doctor the Dog Week.

With all his Weeks, Pickerbaugh had time to preside over the
Program Committee of the State Convention of Health Officers and
Agencies.

It was he who wrote the circular letter sent to all members:


Brother Males and Shemales:

Are you coming to the Health Bee?  It will be the livest Hop-to-it
that this busy lil ole planet has ever see.  And it's going to be
Practical.  We'll kiss out on all these glittering generalities and
get messages from men as kin talk, so we can lug a think or two (2)
home wid us.

Luther Botts, the famous community-sing leader, will be there to
put Wim an Wigor neverything into the program.  John F. Zeisser,
M.A., M.D., nail the rest of the alphabet (part your hair Jack and
look cute, the ladies will love you) will unlimber a coupla key-
notes.  (On your tootsies, fellers, thar she blows!)  From time to
time, if the brakes hold, we will, or shall in the infinitive, hie
oursellufs from wherein we are at to thither, and grab a lunch with
Wild Wittles.

Do it sound like a good show?  It do!  Barber, you're next.  Let's
have those cards saying you're coming.


This created much enthusiasm and merriment.  Dr. Feesons of Clinton
wrote to Pickerbaugh:


I figure it was largely due to your snappy come-on letter that we
pulled such an attendance and with all modesty I think we may say
it was the best health convention ever held in the world.  I had to
laugh at one old hen, Bostonian or somepun, who was howling that
your letter was "undignified"!  Can you beat it!  I think people as
hypercritical and lacking in humor as her should be treated with
the dignified contempt they deserve, the damn fool!


II


Martin was enthusiastic during Better Babies Week.  Leora and he
weighed babies, examined them, made out diet charts, and in each
child saw the baby they could never have.  But when it came to More
Babies Week, then he was argumentative.  He believed, he said, in
birth-control.  Pickerbaugh answered with theology, violence, and
the example of his own eight beauties.

Martin was equally unconvinced by Anti-Tuberculosis Week.  He liked
his windows open at night and he disliked men who spat tobacco
juice on sidewalks, but he was jarred by hearing these certainly
esthetic and possibly hygienic reforms proposed with holy frenzy
and bogus statistics.

Any questioning of his fluent figures about tuberculosis, any hint
that the cause of decline in the disease may have been natural
growth of immunity and not the crusades against spitting and stale
air, Pickerbaugh regarded as a criticism of his honesty in making
such crusades.  He had the personal touchiness of most propagandists;
he believed that because he was sincere, therefore his opinions must
always be correct.  To demand that he be accurate in his statements,
to quote Raymond Pearl's dictum:  "As a matter of objective
scientific fact, extremely little is known about why the mortality
from tuberculosis has declined"--this was to be a scoundrel who
really liked to befoul the pavements.

Martin was so alienated that he took an anti-social and probably
vicious joy in discovering that though the death-rate in
tuberculosis certainly had decreased during Pickerbaugh's
administration in Nautilus, it had decreased at the same rate in
most villages of the district, with no speeches about spitting, no
Open Your Windows parades.

It was fortunate for Martin that Pickerbaugh did not expect him to
take much share in his publicity campaigns, but rather to be his
substitute in the office during them.  They stirred in Martin the
most furious and complicated thoughts that had ever afflicted him.

Whenever he hinted criticism, Pickerbaugh answered, "What if my
statistics aren't always exact?  W'hat if my advertising, my
jollying of the public, does strike some folks as vulgar?  It all
does good; it's all on the right side.  No matter what methods we
use, if we can get people to have more fresh air and cleaner yards
and less alcohol, we're justified."

To himself, a little surprised, Martin put it, "Yes, does it really
matter?  Does truth matter--clean, cold, unfriendly truth, Max
Gottlieb's truth?  Everybody says, 'Oh, you mustn't tamper with the
truth,' and everybody is furious if you hint that they themselves
are tampering with it.  Does anything matter, except making love
and sleeping and eating and being flattered?

"I think truth does matter to me, but if it does, isn't the desire
for scientific precision simply my hobby, like another man's
excitement about his golf?  Anyway, I'm going to stick by
Pickerbaugh."

To the defense of his chief he was the more impelled by the
attitude of Irving Watters and such other physicians as attacked
Pickerbaugh because they feared that he really would be successful,
and reduce their earnings.  But all the while Martin was weary of
unchecked statistics.

He estimated that according to Pickerbaugh's figures on bad teeth,
careless motoring, tuberculosis, and seven other afflictions alone,
every person in the city had a one hundred and eighty per cent
chance of dying before the age of sixteen and he could not startle
with much alarm when Pickerbaugh shouted, "Do you realize that the
number of people who died from yaws in Pickens County, Mississippi,
last year alone, was twenty-nine and that they might all have been
saved, yes, sir, SAVED, by a daily cold shower?"

For Pickerbaugh had the dreadful habit of cold showers, even in
winter, though he might have known that nineteen men between the
ages of seventeen and forty-two died of cold showers in twenty-two
years in Milwaukee alone.

To Pickerbaugh the existence of "variables," a word which Martin
now used as irritatingly as once he had used "control," was without
significance.  That health might be determined by temperature,
heredity, profession, soil, natural immunity, or by anything save
health-department campaigns for increased washing and morality, was
to him inconceivable

"Variables!  Huh!" Pickerbaugh snorted.  "Why, every enlightened
man in the public service KNOWS enough about the causes of disease--
matter now of acting on that knowledge."

When Martin sought to show that they certainly knew very little
about the superiority of fresh air to warmth in schools, about the
hygienic dangers of dirty streets about the real danger of alcohol,
about the value of face-masks in influenza epidemics, about most of
the things they tub-thumped in their campaigns, Pickerbaugh merely
became angry, and Martin wanted to resign, and saw Irving Watters
again, and returned to Pickerbaugh with new zeal, and was in
general as agitated and wretched as a young revolutionist
discovering the smugness of his leaders.

He came to question what Pickerbaugh called "the proven practical
value" of his campaigns as much as the accuracy of Pickerbaugh's
biology.  He noted how bored were most of the newspapermen by being
galvanized into a new saving of the world once a fortnight, and how
incomparably bored was the Man in the Street when the nineteenth
pretty girl in twenty days had surged up demanding that he buy a
tag to support an association of which he had never heard.

But more dismaying was the slimy trail of the dollar which he
beheld in Pickerbaugh's most ardent eloquence.

When Martin suggested that all milk should be pasteurized, that
certain tenements known to be tuberculosis-breeders should be burnt
down instead of being fumigated in a fiddling useless way, when he
hinted that these attacks would save more lives than ten thousand
sermons and ten years of parades by little girls carrying banners
and being soaked by the rain, then Pickerbaugh worried, "No, no,
Martin, don't think we could do that.  Get so much opposition from
the dairymen and the landlords.  Can't accomplish anything in this
work unless you keep from offending people."

When Pickerbaugh addressed a church or the home circle he spoke of
"the value of health in making life more joyful," but when he
addressed a business luncheon he changed it to "the value in good
round dollars and cents of having workmen who are healthy and
sober, and therefore able to work faster at the same wages."
Parents' associations he enlightened upon "the saving in doctors'
bills of treating the child before maladjustments go too far,' but
to physicians he gave assurance that public health agitation would
merely make the custom of going regularly to doctors more popular.

To Martin, he spoke of Pasteur, George Washington, Victor Vaughan,
and Edison as his masters, but in asking the business men of
Nautilus--the Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce, the association
of wholesalers--for their divine approval of more funds for his
department, he made it clear that they were his masters and lords
of all the land, and fatly, behind cigars, they accepted their
kinghood.

Gradually Martin's contemplation moved beyond Almus Pickerbaugh to
all leaders, of armies or empires, of universities or churches, and
he saw that most of them were Pickerbaughs.  He preached to
himself, as Max Gottlieb had once preached to him, the loyalty of
dissent, the faith of being very doubtful, the gospel of not
bawling gospels, the wisdom of admitting the probable ignorance of
one's self and of everybody else, and the energetic acceleration of
a Movement for going very slow.


III


A hundred interruptions took Martin out of his laboratory.  He was
summoned into the reception-room of the department to explain to
angry citizens why the garage next door to them should smell of
gasoline; he went back to his cubbyhole to dictate letters to
school-principals about dental clinics; he drove out to Swede
Hollow to see what attention the food and dairy inspector had given
to the slaughterhouses; he ordered a family in Shantytown
quarantined; and escaped at last into the laboratory.

It was well lighted, convenient, well stocked.  Martin had little
time for anything but cultures, blood-tests, and Wassermanns for
the private physicians of the city, but the work rested him, and
now and then he struggled over a precipitation test which was going
to replace Wassermanns and make him famous.

Pickerbaugh apparently believed that this research would take six
weeks; Martin had hoped to do it in two years; and with the present
interruptions it would require two hundred, by which time the
Pickerbaughs would have eradicated syphilis and made the test
useless.

To Martin's duties was added the entertainment of Leora in the
strange city of Nautilus.

"Do you manage to keep busy all day?" he encouraged her, and, "Any
place you'd like to go this evening?"

She looked at him suspiciously.  She was as easily and automatically
contented by herself as a pussy cat, and he had never before worried
about her amusement.


IV


The Pickerbaugh daughters were always popping into Martin's
laboratory.  The twins broke test-tubes, and made doll tents out of
filter paper.  Orchid lettered the special posters for her father's
Weeks, and the laboratory, she said, was the quietest place in
which to work.  While Martin stood at his bench he was conscious of
her, humming at a table in the corner.  They talked, tremendously,
and he listened with fatuous enthusiasm to opinions which, had
Leora produced them, he would have greeted with "That's a damn'
silly remark!"

He held a clear, claret-red tube of hemolyzed blood up to the
light, thinking half of its color and half of Orchid's ankles as
she bent over the table, absurdly patient with her paintbrushes,
curling her legs in a fantastic knot.

Absurdly he asked her, "Look here, honey.  Suppose you--suppose a
kid like you were to fall in love with a married man.  What d'you
think she ought to do?  Be nice to him?  Or chuck him?"

"Oh, she ought to chuck him.  No matter how much she suffered.
Even if she liked him terribly.  Because even if she liked him, she
oughtn't to wrong his wife."

"But suppose the wife never knew, or maybe didn't care?"  He had
stopped his pretense of working; he was standing before her, arms
akimbo, dark eyes demanding.

"Well, if she didn't know--  But it isn't that.  I believe
marriages really and truly are made in Heaven, don't you?  Some day
Prince Charming will come, the perfect lover--"  She was so young,
her lips were so young, so very sweet!  "--and of course I want to
keep myself for him.  It would spoil everything if I made light of
love before my Hero came."

But her smile was caressing.

He pictured them thrown together in a lonely camp.  He saw her
parroted moralities forgotten.  He went through a change as
definite as religious conversion or the coming of insane frenzy in
war; the change from shamed reluctance to be unfaithful to his
wife, to a determination to take what he could get.  He began to
resent Leora's demand that she, who had eternally his deepest love,
should also demand his every wandering fancy.  And she did demand
it.  She rarely spoke of Orchid, but she could tell (or nervously
he thought she could tell) when he had spent an afternoon with the
child.  Her mute examination of him made him feel illicit.  He who
had never been unctuous was profuse and hearty as he urged her,
"Been home all day?  Well, we'll just skip out after dinner and
take in a movie.  Or shall we call up somebody and go see 'em?
Whatever you'd like."

He heard his voice being flowery, and he hated it and knew that
Leora was not cajoled.  Whenever he drifted into one of his
meditations on the superiority of his brand of truth to
Pickerbaugh's, he snarled, "You're a fine bird to think about
truth, you liar!"

He paid, in fact, an enormous price for looking at Orchid's lips,
and no amount of anxiety about the price kept him from looking at
them.

In early summer, two months before the outbreak of the Great War in
Europe, Leora went to Wheatsylvania for a fortnight with her
family.  Then she spoke:

"Sandy, I'm not going to ask you any questions when I come back,
but I hope you won't look as foolish as you've been looking lately.
I don't think that bachelor's button, that ragweed, that lady idiot
of yours is worth our quarreling.  Sandy darling, I do want you to
be happy, but unless I up and die on you some day, I'm not going to
be hung up like an old cap.  I warn you.  Now about ice.  I've left
an order for a hundred pounds a week, and if you want to get your
own dinners sometimes--"

When she had gone, nothing immediately happened, though a good deal
was always about to happen.  Orchid had the flapper's curiosity as
to what a man was likely to do, but she was satisfied by
exceedingly small thrills.

Martin swore, that morning of June, that she was a fool and a
flirt, and he "hadn't the slightest intention of going near her."
No!  He would call on Irving Watters in the evening, or read, or
have a walk with the school-clinic dentist.

But at half-past eight he was loitering toward her house.

If the elder Pickerbaughs were there--  Martin could hear himself
saying, "Thought I'd just drop by, Doctor, and ask you what you
thought about--"  Hang it!  Thought about what?  Pickerbaugh never
thought about anything.

On the low front steps he could see Orchid.  Leaning over her was a
boy of twenty, one Charley, a clerk.

"Hello, Father in?" he cried, with a carelessness on which he could
but pride himself.

"I'm terribly sorry; he and Mama won't be back till eleven.  Won't
you sit down and cool off a little?"

"Well--"  He did sit down, firmly, and tried to make youthful
conversation, while Charley produced sentiments suitable, in
Charley's opinion, to the aged Dr. Arrowsmith, and Orchid made
little purry interested sounds, an art in which she was very
intelligent.

"Been, uh, been seeing many of the baseball games?" said Martin.

"Oh, been getting in all I can," said Charley.  "How's things going
at City Hall?  Been nailing a lot of cases of small-pox and
winkulus pinkulus and all those fancy diseases?"

"Oh, keep busy," grunted old Dr. Arrowsmith.

He could think of nothing else.  He listened while Charley and
Orchid giggled cryptically about things which barred him out and
made him feel a hundred years old: references to Mamie and Earl,
and a violent "Yeh, that's all right, but any time you see me
dancing with her you just tell me about it, will yuh!"  At the
corner, Verbena Pickerbaugh was yelping, and observing, "Now you
quit!" to persons unknown.

"Hell!  It isn't worth it!  I'm going home," Martin sighed, but at
the moment Charley screamed, "Well, ta, ta, be good; gotta toddle
along."

He was left to Orchid and peace and a silence rather embarrassing.

"It's so nice to be with somebody that has brains and doesn't
always try to flirt, like Charley," said Orchid.

He considered, "Splendid!  She's going to be just a nice good girl.
And I've come to my senses.  We'll just have a little chat and I'll
go home."

She seemed to have moved nearer.  She whispered at him, "I was so
lonely, especially with that horrid slangy boy, till I heard your
step on the walk.  I knew it the second I heard it."

He patted her hand.  As his pats were becoming more ardent than
might have been expected from the assistant and friend of her
father, she withdrew her hand, clasped her knees, and began to
chatter.

Always it had been so in the evenings when he had drifted to the
porch and found her alone.  She was ten times more incalculable
than the most complex woman.  He managed to feel guilty toward
Leora without any of the reputed joys of being guilty.

While she talked he tried to discover whether she had any brains
whatever.  Apparently she did not have enough to attend a small
Midwestern denominational college.  Verbena was going to college
this autumn, but Orchid, she explained, thought she "ought to stay
home and help Mama take care of the chickabiddies."

"Meaning," Martin reflected, "that she can't even pass the Mugford
entrance exams!"  But his opinion of her intelligence was suddenly
enlarged as she whimpered, "Poor little me, prob'ly I'll always
stay here in Nautilus, while you--oh, with your knowledge and your
frightfully strong will-power, I know you're going to conquer the
world!"

"Nonsense, I'll never conquer any world, but I do hope to pull off
a few good health measures.  Honestly, Orchid honey, do you think I
have much will-power?"

The full moon was spacious now behind the maples.  The seedy
Pickerbaugh domain was enchanted; the tangled grass was a garden of
roses, the ragged grape-arbor a shrine to Diana, the old hammock
turned to fringed cloth of silver, the bad-tempered and sputtering
lawn-sprinkler a fountain, and over all the world was the proper
witchery of moonstruck love.  The little city, by day as noisy and
busy as a pack of children, was stilled and forgotten.  Rarely had
Martin been inspired to perceive the magic of a perfect hour, so
absorbed was he ever in irascible pondering, but now he was caught,
and lifted in rapture.

He held Orchid's quiet hand--and was lonely for Leora.

The belligerent Martin who had carried off Leora had not thought
about romance, because in his clumsy way he had been romantic.  The
Martin who, like a returned warrior scented and enfeebled, yearned
toward a girl in the moonlight, now desirously lifted his face to
romance and was altogether unromantic.

He felt the duty of making love.  He drew her close, but when she
sighed, "Oh, please don't," there was in him no ruthlessness and no
conviction with which to go on.  He considered the moonlight again,
but also he considered being at the office early in the morning,
and he wondered if he could without detection slip out his watch
and see what time it was.  He managed it.  He stooped to kiss her
good-night, and somehow didn't quite kiss her, and found himself
walking home.

As he went, he was ruthless and convinced enough regarding himself.
He had never, he raged, however stumbling he might have been,
expected to find himself a little pilferer of love, a peeping,
creeping area-sneak, and not even successful in his sneaking, less
successful than the soda-clerks who swanked nightly with the
virgins under the maples.  He told himself that Orchid was a young
woman of no great wisdom, a sigher and drawer-out of her M's and
O's, but once he was in his lonely flat he longed for her, thought
of miraculous and completely idiotic ways of luring her here
tonight, and went to bed yearning, "Oh, Orchid--"

Perhaps he had paid too much attention to moonlight and soft
summer, for quite suddenly, one day when Orchid came swarming all
over the laboratory and perched on the bench with a whisk of
stockings, he stalked to her, masterfully seized her wrists, and
kissed her as she deserved to be kissed.

He immediately ceased to be masterful.  He was frightened.  He
stared at her wanly.  She stared back, shocked, eyes wide, lips
uncertain.

"Oh!" she profoundly said.

Then, in a tone of immense interest and some satisfaction:

"Martin--oh--my dear--do you think you ought to have done that?"

He kissed her again.  She yielded and for a moment there was
nothing in the universe, neither he nor she, neither laboratory nor
fathers nor wives nor traditions, but only the intensity of their
being together.

Suddenly she babbled, "I know there's lots of conventional people
that would say we'd done wrong, and perhaps I'd have thought so,
one time, but--  Oh, I'm terribly glad I'm liberal!  Of course I
wouldn't hurt dear Leora or do anything REALLY wrong for the world,
but isn't it wonderful that with so many bourgeois folks all
around, we can rise above them and realize the call that strength
makes to strength and--  But I've simply GOT to be at the Y.W.C.A.
meeting.  There's a woman lawyer from New York that's going to tell
us about the Modern Woman's Career."

When she had gone Martin viewed himself as a successful lover.
"I've won her," he gloated. . . .  Probably never has gloating been
so shakily and badly done.

That evening, when he was playing poker in his flat with Irving
Watters, the school-clinic dentist, and a young doctor from the
city clinic, the telephone bell summoned him to an excited but
saccharine:

"This is Orchid.  Are you glad I called up?"

"Oh, yes, yes, mighty glad you called up."  He tried to make it at
once amorously joyful, and impersonal enough to beguile the three
coatless, beer-swizzling, grinning doctors.

"Are you doing anything this evening, Marty?"

"Just, uh, couple fellows here for a little game cards."

"Oh!"  It was acute.  "Oh, then you--  I was such a baby to call
you up, but Daddy is away and Verbena and everybody, and it was
such a lovely evening, and I just thought--  DO you think I'm an
awful little silly?"

"No--no--sure not."

"I'm so glad you don't.  I'd hate it if I thought you thought I was
just a silly to call you up.  You don't, do you?"

"No--no--course not.  Look, I've got to--"

"I know.  I mustn't keep you.  But I just wanted you to tell me
whether you thought I was a silly to--"

"No!  Honest!  Really!"

Three fidgety minutes later, deplorably aware of masculine snickers
from behind him, he escaped.  The poker-players said all the things
considered suitable in Nautilus:  "Oh, you little Don Jewen!" and
"Can you beat it--his wife only gone for a week!" and "Who is she,
Doctor?  Go on, you tightwad, bring her up here!" and "Say, I know
who it is; it's that little milliner on Prairie Avenue."

Next noon she telephoned from a drug store that she had lain awake
all night, and on profound contemplation decided that they "musn't
ever do that sort of thing again"--and would he meet her at the
corner of Crimmins Street and Missouri Avenue at eight, so that
they might talk it all over?

In the afternoon she telephoned and changed the tryst to half-past
eight.

At five she called up just to remind him--

In the laboratory that day Martin transplanted cultures no more.
He was too confusedly human to be a satisfactory experimenter, too
coldly thinking to be a satisfactory sinful male, and all the while
he longed for the sure solace of Leora.

"I can go as far as I like with her tonight.

"But she's a brainless man-chaser.

"All the better.  I'm tired of being a punk philosopher.

"I wonder if these other lucky lovers that you read about in all
this fiction and poetry feel as glum as I do?

"I will NOT be middle-aged and cautious and monogamic and moral!
It's against my religion.  I demand the right to be free--

"Hell!  These free souls that have to slave at being free are just
as bad as their Methodist dads.  I have enough sound natural
immorality in me so I can afford to be moral.  I want to keep my
brain clear for work.  I don't want it blurred by dutifully running
around trying to kiss everybody I can.

"Orchid is too easy.  I hate to give up the right of being a happy
sinner, but my way was so straight, with just Leora and my work,
and I'm not going to mess it.  God help any man that likes his work
and his wife!  He's beaten from the beginning."

He met Orchid at eight-thirty, and the whole matter was unkind.  He
was equally distasteful of the gallant Martin of two days ago and
the prosy cautious Martin of tonight.  He went home desolately
ascetic, and longed for Orchid all the night.

A week later Leora returned from Wheatsylvania.

He met her at the station.

"It's all right," he said.  "I feel a hundred and seven years old.
I'm a respectable, moral young man, and Lord how I'd hate it, if it
wasn't for my precipitation test and you and--  WHY do you always
lose your trunk check?  I suppose I am a bad example for others,
giving up so easily.  No, no, darling, can't you SEE, that's the
transportation check the conductor gave you!"




Chapter 22



This summer Pickerbaugh had shouted and hand-shaken his way through
a brief Chautauqua tour in Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas.  Martin
realized that though he seemed, in contrast to Gustaf Sondelius, an
unfortunately articulate and generous lout, he was destined to be
ten times better known in America than Sondelius could ever be, a
thousand times better known than Max Gottlieb.

He was a correspondent of many of the nickel-plated Great Men whose
pictures and sonorous aphorisms appeared in the magazines: the
advertising men who wrote little books about Pep and Optimism, the
editor of the magazine which told clerks how to become Goethes and
Stonewall Jacksons by studying correspondence-courses and never
touching the manhood-rotting beer, and the cornfield sage who was
equally an authority on finance, peace, biology, editing, Peruvian
ethnology, and making oratory pay.  These intellectual rulers
recognized Pickerbaugh as one of them; they wrote quippish letters
to him: and when he answered he signed himself "Pick," in red
pencil.

The Onward March Magazine, which specialized in biographies of Men
Who Have Made Good, had an account of Pickerbaugh among its
sketches of the pastor who built his own, beautiful Neo-Gothic
church out of tin cans, the lady who had in seven years kept 2,698
factory-girls from leading lives of shame, and the Oregon cobbler
who had taught himself to read Sanskrit, Finnish, and Esperanto.

"Meet Ol' Doe Almus Pickerbaugh, a he-man whom Chum Frink has
hailed as 'the two-fisted, fighting poet doc,' a scientist who puts
his remarkable discoveries right over third base, yet who, as a
reg'lar old-fashioned Sunday-school superintendent, rebukes the
atheistic so-called scientists that are menacing the foundations of
our religion and liberties by their smart-aleck cracks at
everything that is noble and improving," chanted the chronicler.

Martin was reading this article, trying to realize that it was
actually exposed in a fabulous New York magazine, with a million
circulation, when Pickerbaugh summoned him.

"Marty" he said, "do you feel competent to run this Department?"

"Why, uh--"

"Do you think you can buck the Interests and keep a clean city all
by yourself?"

"Why, uh--"

"Because it looks as if I were going to Washington, as the next
congressman from this district!"

"Really?"

"Looks that way.  Boy, I'm going to take to the whole nation the
Message I've tried to ram home here!"

Martin got out quite a good "I congratulate you."  He was so
astonished that it sounded fervent.  He still had a fragment of his
boyhood belief that congressmen were persons of intelligence and
importance.

"I've just been in conference with some of the leading Republicans
of the district.  Great surprise to me.  Ha, ha, ha!  Maybe they
picked me because they haven't anybody else to run this year.  Ha,
ha, ha!"

Martin also laughed.  Pickerbaugh looked as though that was not
exactly the right response, but he recovered and caroled on:

"I said to them, 'Gentlemen, I must warn you that I am not sure I
possess the rare qualifications needful in a man who shall have the
high privilege of laying down, at Washington, the rules and
regulations for the guidance, in every walk of life, of this great
nation of a hundred million people.  However, gentlemen,' I said,
'the impulse that prompts me to consider, in all modesty, your
unexpected and probably undeserved honor is the fact that it seems
to me that what Congress needs is more forward-looking scientists
to plan and more genu-ine trained business men to execute the
improvements demanded by our evolving commonwealth, and also the
possibility of persuading the Boys there at Washington of the pre-
eminent and crying need of a Secretary of Health who shall
completely control--'"

But no matter what Martin thought about it, the Republicans really
did nominate Pickerbaugh for Congress.


II


While Pickerbaugh went out campaigning, Martin was in charge of the
Department, and he began his reign by getting himself denounced as
a tyrant and a radical.

There was no more sanitary and efficient dairy in Iowa than that of
old Klopchuk, on the outskirts of Nautilus.  It was tiled and
drained and excellently lighted; the milking machines were perfect;
the bottles were super-boiled; and Klopchuk welcomed inspectors and
the tuberculin test.  He had fought the dairy-men's union and kept
his dairy open-shop by paying more than the union scale.  Once,
when Martin attended a meeting of the Nautilus Central Labor
Council as Pickerbaugh's representative, the secretary of the
council confessed that there was no plant which they would so like
to unionize and which they were so unlikely to unionize as
Klopchuk's Dairy.

Now Martin's labor sympathies were small.  Like most laboratory
men, he believed that the reason why workmen found less joy in
sewing vests or in pulling a lever than he did in a long research
was because they were an inferior race, born lazy and wicked.  The
complaint of the unions was the one thing to convince him that at
last he had found perfection.

Often he stopped at Klopchuk's merely for the satisfaction of it.
He noted but one thing which disturbed him: a milker had a
persistent sore throat.  He examined the man, made cultures, and
found hemolytic streptococcus.  In a panic he hurried back to the
dairy, and after cultures he discovered that there was streptococcus
in the udders of three cows.

When Pickerbaugh had saved the health of the nation through all the
smaller towns in the congressional district and had returned to
Nautilus, Martin insisted on the quarantine of the infected milker
and the closing of the Klopchuk Dairy till no more infection should
be found.

"Nonsense!  Why, that's the cleanest place in the city,"
Pickerbaugh scoffed.  "Why borrow trouble?  There's no sign of an
epidemic of strep."

"There darn' well will be!  Three cows infected.  Look at what's
happened in Boston and Baltimore, here recently.  I've asked
Klopchuk to come in and talk it over."

"Well, you know how busy I am, but--"

Klopchuk appeared at eleven, and to Klopchuk the affair was tragic.
Born in a gutter in Poland, starving in New York, working twenty
hours a day in Vermont, in Ohio, in Iowa, he had made this
beautiful thing, his dairy.

Seamed, drooping, twirling his hat, almost in tears, he protested,
"Dr. Pickerbaugh, I do everything the doctors say is necessary.  I
know dairies!  Now comes this young man and he says because one of
my men has a cold, I kill little children with diseased milk!  I
tell you, this is my life, and I would sooner hang myself than send
out one drop of bad milk.  The young man has some wicked reason.  I
have asked questions.  I find he is a great friend from the Central
Labor Council.  Why, he go to their meetings!  And they want to
break me!"

To Martin the trembling old man was pitiful, but he had never
before been accused of treachery.  He said grimly:

"You can take up the personal charges against me later, Dr.
Pickerbaugh.  Meantime I suggest you have in some expert to test my
results; say Long of Chicago or Brent of Minneapolis or somebody."

"I--I--I--"  The Kipling and Billy Sunday of health looked as
distressed as Klopchuk.  "I'm sure our friend here doesn't really
mean to make charges against you, Mart.  He's overwrought,
naturally.  Can't we just treat the fellow that has the strep
infection and not make everybody uncomfortable?"

"All right, if you want a bad epidemic here, toward the end of your
campaign!"

"You know cussed well I'd do anything to avoid--  Though I want you
to distinctly understand it has nothing to do with my campaign for
Congress!  It's simply that I owe my city the most scrupulous
performance of duty in safeguarding it against disease, and the
most fearless enforcement--"

At the end of his oratory Pickerbaugh telegraphed to Dr. J. C.
Long, the Chicago bacteriologist.

Dr. Long looked as though he had made the train journey in an ice-
box.  Martin had never seen a man so free from the poetry and
flowing philanthropy of Almus Pickerbaugh.  He was slim, precise,
lipless, lapless, and eye-glassed, and his hair was parted in the
middle.  He coolly listened to Martin, coldly listened to
Pickerbaugh, icily heard Klopchuk, made his inspection, and
reported, "Dr. Arrowsmith seems to know his business perfectly,
there is certainly a danger here, I advise closing the dairy, my
fee is one hundred dollars, thank you no I shall not stay to dinner
I must catch the evening train."

Martin went home to Leora snarling, "That man was just as lovable
as a cucumber salad, but my God, Lee, with his freedom from bunk
he's made me wild to get back to research; away from all these
humanitarians that are so busy hollering about loving the dear
people that they let the people die!  I hated him, but--  Wonder
what Max Gottlieb's doing this evening?  The old German crank!
I'll bet--I'll bet he's talking music or something with some
terrible highbrow bunch.  Wouldn't you like to see the old coot
again?  You know, just couple minutes.  D'I ever tell you about the
time I made the dandy stain of the trypanosomes--  Oh, did I?"

He assumed that with the temporary closing of the dairy the matter
was ended.  He did not understand how hurt was Klopchuk.  He knew
that Irving Watters, Klopchuk's physician, was unpleasant when they
met, grumbling, "What's the use going on being an alarmist, Mart?"
But he did not know how many persons in Nautilus had been trustily
informed that this fellow Arrowsmith was in the pay of labor-union
thugs.


III


Two months before, when Martin had been making his annual
inspection of factories, he had encountered Clay Tredgold, the
president (by inheritance) of the Steel Windmill Company.  He had
heard that Tredgold, an elaborate but easy-spoken man of forty-
five, moved as one clad in purple on the loftiest planes of
Nautilus society.  After the inspection Tredgold urged, "Sit down,
Doctor; have a cigar and tell me all about sanitation."

Martin was wary.  There was in Tredgold's affable eye a sardonic
flicker.

"What d'you want to know about sanitation?"

"Oh, all about it."

"The only thing I know is that your men must like you.  Of course
you haven't enough wash-bowls in that second-floor toilet room, and
the whole lot of 'em swore you were putting in others immediately.
If they like you enough to lie against their own interests, you
must be a good boss, and I think I'll let you get away with it--
till my next inspection!  Well, got to hustle."

Tredgold beamed on him.  "My dear man, I've been pulling that dodge
on Pickerbaugh for three years.  I'm glad to have seen you.  And I
think I really may put in some more bowls--just before your next
inspection.  Good-by!"

After the Klopchuk affair, Martin and Leora encountered Clay
Tredgold and that gorgeous slim woman, his wife, in front of a
motion-picture theater.

"Give you a lift, Doctor?" cried Tredgold.

On the way he suggested, "I don't know whether you're dry, like
Pickerbaugh, but if you'd like I'll run you out to the house and
present you with the noblest cocktail conceived since Evangeline
County went dry.  Does it sound reasonable?"

"I haven't heard anything so reasonable for years," said Martin.

The Tredgold house was on the highest knoll (fully twenty feet
above the general level of the plain) in Ashford Grove, which is
the Back Bay of Nautilus.  It was a Colonial structure, with a sun-
parlor, a white-paneled hall, and a blue and silver drawing-room.
Martin tried to look casual as they were wafted in on Mrs.
Tredgold's chatter, but it was the handsomest house he had ever
entered.

While Leora sat on the edge of her chair in the manner of one
likely to be sent home, and Mrs. Tredgold sat forward like a
hostess, Tredgold flourished the cocktail-shaker and performed
courtesies:

"How long you been here now, Doctor?"

"Almost a year."

"Try that.  Look here, it strikes me you're kind of different from
Salvation Pickerbaugh."

Martin felt that he ought to praise his chief but, to Leora's
gratified amazement, he sprang up and ranted in something like
Pickerbaugh's best manner:

"Gentlemen of the Steel Windmill Industries, than which there is no
other that has so largely contributed to the prosperity of our
commonwealth, while I realize that you are getting away with every
infraction of the health laws that the inspector doesn't catch you
at, yet I desire to pay a tribute to your high respect for
sanitation, patriotism, and cocktails, and if I only had an
assistant more earnest than young Arrowsmith, I should, with your
permission, become President of the United States."

Tredgold clapped.  Mrs. Tredgold asserted, "If that isn't exactly
like Dr. Pickerbaugh!"  Leora looked proud, and so did her husband.

"I'm so glad you're free from this socialistic clap-trap of
Pickerbaugh's," said Tredgold.

The assumption roused something sturdy and defensive in Martin:

"Oh, I don't care a hang how socialistic he is--whatever that
means.  Don't know anything about socialism.  But since I've gone
and given an imitation of him--I suppose it was probably disloyal--
I must say I'm not very fond of oratory that's so full of energy it
hasn't any room for facts.  But mind you, Tredgold, it's partly the
fault of people like your Manufacturers' Association.  You encourage
him to rant.  I'm a laboratory man--or rather, I sometimes wish I
were.  I like to deal with exact figures."

"So do I.  I was keen on mathematics in Williams," said Tredgold.

Instantly Martin and he were off on education, damning the
universities for turning out graduates like sausages.  Martin found
himself becoming confidential about "variables," and Tredgold
proclaimed that he had not wanted to take up the ancestral factory,
but to specialize in astronomy.

Leora was confessing to the friendly Mrs. Tredgold how cautiously
the wife of an assistant director has to economize and with that
caressing voice of hers Mrs. Tredgold comforted, "I know.  I was
horribly hard-up after Dad died.  Have you tried the little Swedish
dressmaker on Crimmins Street, two doors from the Catholic church?
She's awfully clever, and so cheap."

Martin had found, for the first time since marriage, a house in
which he was altogether happy; Leora had found, in a woman with the
easy smartness which she had always feared and hated, the first
woman to whom she could talk of God and the price of toweling.
They came out from themselves and were not laughed at.

It was at midnight, when the charms of ba