Public Domain Tales: Arrowsmith: Book Three is the one-hundred-and-seventy-first book in the Public Domain Tales series.
CHAPTER XII
I
At the moment when Martin met him on the street, Gottlieb was ruined.
Max Gottlieb was a German Jew, born in Saxony in 1850. Though he tookhis medical degree, at Heidelberg, he was never interested in practisingmedicine. He was a follower of Helmholtz, and youthful researches in thephysics of sound convinced him of the need of the quantitative method inthe 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 avicious assailant of what he considered slackness or lie or pomposity,never too kindly to well-intentioned stupidity, he worked in thelaboratories of Koch, of Pasteur, he followed the early statements ofPearson in biometrics, he drank beer and wrote vitriolic letters, hevoyaged to Italy and England and Scandinavia, and casually, between twodays, 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, veryundramatic-sounding, very long, and exceedingly unappreciated. Back in1881 he was confirming Pasteur’s results in chicken cholera immunityand, for relief and pastime, trying to separate an enzyme from yeast. Afew years later, living on the tiny inheritance from his father, a pettybanker, and quite carelessly and cheerfully exhausting it, he wasanalyzing critically the ptomain theory of disease, and investigatingthe mechanism of the attenuation of virulence of microörganisms. He gotthereby small fame. Perhaps he was over-cautious, and more than thedevil or starvation he hated men who rushed into publication unprepared.
Though he meddled little in politics, considering them the mostrepetitious and least scientific of human activities, he was asufficiently patriotic German to hate the Junkers. As a youngster hehad a fight or two with ruffling subalterns; once he spent a week injail; often he was infuriated by discriminations against Jews: and atforty he went sadly off to the America which could never becomemilitaristic 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. Heannounced that antibodies, excepting antitoxin, had no relation to theimmune state of an animal, and while he himself was being raginglydenounced in the small but hectic world of scientists, he dealt calmlyand most brutally with Yersin’s and Marmorek’s theories of sera.
His dearest dream, now and for years of racking research, was theartificial production of antitoxin--its production _in vitro_. Once hewas prepared to publish, but he found an error and rigidly suppressedhis notes. All the while he was lonely. There was apparently no one inQueen City who regarded him as other than a cranky Jew catching microbesby their little tails and leering at them--no work for a tall man at atime when heroes were building bridges, experimenting with HorselessCarriages, writing the first of the poetic Compelling Ads, and sellingmiles of calico and cigars.
In 1899 he was called to the University of Winnemac, as professor ofbacteriology in the medical school, and here he drudged on for a dozenyears. Not once did he talk of results of the sort called “practical”;not once did he cease warring on the _post hoc propter hoc_ conclusionswhich still make up most medical lore; not once did he fail to be hatedby his colleagues, who were respectful to his face, uncomfortable infeeling his ironic power, but privily joyous to call him Mephisto,Diabolist, Killjoy, Pessimist, Destructive Critic, Flippant Cynic,Scientific Bounder Lacking in Dignity and Seriousness, IntellectualSnob, Pacifist, Anarchist, Atheist, Jew. They said, with reason, that hewas so devoted to Pure Science, to art for art’s sake, that he wouldrather 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 merehuman beings.
The total number of his papers, in a brisk scientific realm where reallyclever people published five times a year, was not more than twenty-fivein thirty years. They were all exquisitely finished, all easilyreduplicated and checked by the doubtfullest critics.
At Mohalis he was pleased by large facilities for work, by excellentassistants, endless glassware, plenty of guinea pigs, enough monkeys;but he was bored by the round of teaching, and melancholy again in alack of understanding friends. Always he sought some one to whom hecould talk without suspicion or caution. He was human enough, when hemeditated upon the exaltation of doctors bold through ignorance, ofinventors who were but tinkers magnified, to be irritated by his lack offame in America, even in Mohalis, and to complain not too nobly.
He had never dined with a duch*ess, never received a prize, never beeninterviewed, never produced anything which the public could understand,nor experienced anything since his schoolboy amours which nice peoplecould regard as romantic. He was, in fact, an authentic scientist.
He was of the great benefactors of humanity. There will never, in anyage, be an effort to end the great epidemics or the petty infectionswhich will not have been influenced by Max Gottlieb’s researches, for hewas not one who tagged and prettily classified bacteria and protozoa. Hesought their chemistry, the laws of their existence and destruction,basic laws for the most part unknown after a generation of busybiologists. Yet they were right who called him “pessimist,” for this manwho, as much as any other, will have been the cause of reducinginfectious diseases to almost-zero often doubted the value of reducinginfectious diseases at all.
He reflected (it was an international debate in which he was joined by afew and damned by many) that half a dozen generations nearly free fromepidemics would produce a race so low in natural immunity that when agreat plague, suddenly springing from almost-zero to a world-smotheringcloud, appeared again, it might wipe out the world entire, so that themeasures to save lives to which he lent his genius might in the end bethe destruction of all human life.
He meditated that if science and public hygiene did remove tuberculosisand the other major plagues, the world was grimly certain to become soovercrowded, to become such a universal slave-packed shambles, that allbeauty and ease and wisdom would disappear in a famine-driven scamperfor existence. Yet these speculations never checked his work. If thefuture became overcrowded, the future must by birth-control or otherwiselook to itself. Perhaps it would, he reflected. But even this drop ofwholesome optimism was lacking in his final doubts. For he doubted allprogress of the intellect and the emotions, and he doubted, most of all,the superiority of divine mankind to the cheerful dogs, the infalliblygraceful cats, the unmoral and unagitated and irreligious horses, thesuperbly adventuring sea-gulls.
While medical quacks, manufacturers of patent medicines, chewing-gumsalesmen, and high priests of advertising lived in large houses,attended by servants, and took their sacred persons abroadin limousines, Max Gottlieb dwelt in a cramped cottage whosepaint was peeling, and rode to his laboratory on an ancient andsqueaky bicycle. Gottlieb himself protested rarely. He was not sounreasonable--usually--as to demand both freedom and the fruits ofpopular slavery. “Why,” he once said to Martin, “should the world payme for doing what I want and what they do not want?”
If in his house there was but one comfortable chair, on his desk wereletters, long, intimate, and respectful, from the great ones of Franceand Germany, Italy and Denmark, and from scientists whom Great Britainso much valued that she gave them titles almost as high as those withwhich she rewarded distillers, cigarette-manufacturers, and the ownersof obscene newspapers.
But poverty kept him from fulfilment of his summer longing to sitbeneath the poplars by the Rhine or the tranquil Seine, at a table onwhose 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 hadnot learned to speak easy English; and her German was of the small-townbourgeois, who pay their debts and over-eat and grow red. If he was notconfidential 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 oflate. 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, aninstinct about Beethoven, and hatred for the “ragtime” popular inAmerica; an older sister who was nothing in particular; and their boyRobert-- Robert Koch Gottlieb. He was a wild thing and a distress. Theysent him, with anxiety over the cost, to a smart school near Zenith,where he met the sons of manufacturers and discovered a taste for fastmotors and eccentric clothes, and no taste whatever for studying. Athome he clamored that his father was a “tightwad.” When Gottlieb soughtto make it clear that he was a poor man, the boy answered that out ofhis poverty he was always sneakingly spending money on hisresearches--he had no right to do that and shame his son--let theconfounded University provide him with material!
III
There were few of Gottlieb’s students who saw him and his learning asanything but hurdles to be leaped as quickly as possible. One of the fewwas Martin Arrowsmith.
However harshly he may have pointed out Martin’s errors, however loftilyhe may have seemed to ignore his devotion, Gottlieb was as aware ofMartin as Martin of him. He planned vast things. If Martin reallydesired his help (Gottlieb could be as modest personally as he wasegotistic and swaggering in competitive science), he would make theboy’s career his own. During Martin’s minute original research, Gottliebrejoiced in his willingness to abandon conventional--andconvenient--theories of immunology and in the exasperated carefulnesswith which he checked results. When Martin for unknown reasons becamecareless, when he was obviously drinking too much, obviously mixed up insome absurd personal affair, it was tragic hunger for friends andflaming respect for excellent work which drove Gottlieb to snarl at him.Of the apologies demanded by Silva he had no notion. He would haveraged--
He waited for Martin to return. He blamed himself: “Fool! There was afine spirit. You should have known one does not use a platinum loop forshoveling coal.” As long as he could (while Martin was dish-washing andwandering on improbable trains between impossible towns), he put offthe appointment of a new assistant. Then all his wistfulness chilled toanger. 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 asany genius. He did, during the period of Martin’s internship in ZenithGeneral, a thing more preposterous than any of the superstitions atwhich he scoffed.
He tried to become an executive and a reformer! He, the cynic, theanarch, tried to found an Institution, and he went at it like a spinsterorganizing a league to keep small boys from learning naughty words.
He conceived that there might, in this world, be a medical school whichshould be altogether scientific, ruled by exact quantitative biology andchemistry, with spectacle-fitting and most of surgery ignored, and hefurther conceived that such an enterprise might be conducted at theUniversity of Winnemac! He tried to be practical about it; oh, he wasextremely practical and plausible!
“I admit we should not be able to turn out doctors to cure villagebellyaches. And ordinary physicians are admirable and altogethernecessary--perhaps. But there are too many of them already. And on the‘practical’ side, you gif me twenty years of a school that is preciseand cautious, and we shall cure diabetes, maybe tuberculosis and cancer,and all these arthritis things that the carpenters shake their heads atthem and call them ‘rheumatism.’ So!”
He did not desire the control of such a school, nor any credit. He wastoo busy. But at a meeting of the American Academy of Sciences he metone Dr. Entwisle, a youngish physiologist from Harvard, who would makean excellent dean. Entwisle admired him, and sounded him on hiswillingness to be called to Harvard. When Gottlieb outlined his new sortof medical school, Entwisle was fervent. “Nothing I’d like so much as tohave a chance at a place like that,” he fluttered, and Gottlieb wentback to Mohalis triumphant. He was the more assured because (though hesardonically refused it) he was at this time offered the medicaldeanship of the University of West Chippewa.
So simple, or so insane, was he that he wrote to Dean Silva politelybidding him step down and hand over his school--his work, his life--toan 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, themedical school belonged to the people of the state, and its task was toprovide them with immediate and practical attention. For himself, hehinted, if he ever believed that the school would profit by hisresignation he would go at once, but he needed a rather broadersuggestion than a letter from one of his own subordinates!
Gottlieb retorted with spirit and indiscretion. He damned the People ofthe State of Winnemac. Were they, in their present condition ofnincompoopery, worth any sort of attention? He unjustifiably took hisdemand over Silva’s head to that great orator and patriot, Dr. HoraceGreeley Truscott, president of the University.
President Truscott said, “Really, I’m too engrossed to considerchimerical schemes, however ingenious they may be.”
“You are too busy to consider anything but selling honorary degrees tomillionaires 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 memberof this all-ruling body, and when he entered the long Council Chamber,with its gilt ceiling, its heavy maroon curtains, its somber paintingsof pioneers, he started for his usual seat, unconscious of the knot ofwhispering members, meditating on far-off absorbing things.
“Oh, uh, Professor Gottlieb, will you please sit down there at the farend of the table?” called President Truscott.
Then Gottlieb was aware of tensions. He saw that out of the sevenmembers of the Board of Regents, the four who lived in or near Zenithwere present. He saw that sitting beside Truscott was not the dean ofthe academic department but Dean Silva. He saw that however easily theytalked, they were looking at him through the mist of their chatter.
President Truscott announced, “Gentlemen, this joint meeting of theCouncil and the regents is to consider charges against Professor MaxGottlieb 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 andscholastic ethics. Insane egotism. Atheism. Persistent failure tocollaborate with his colleagues, and such inability to understandpractical affairs as makes it dangerous to let him conduct the importantlaboratories and classes with which we have entrusted him. Gentlemen, Ishall now prove each of these points, from Professor Gottlieb’s ownletters to Dean Silva.”
He proved them.
The chairman of the Board of Regents suggested, “Gottlieb, I think itwould simplify things if you just handed us your resignation andpermitted us to part in good feeling, instead of having theunpleasant--”
“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 twistingmy expression, and perfectly accurate expression, of a soundrevolutionary ideal, which would personally to me be of no value oradvantage whatefer, into a desire to steal promotions. That fools shouldjudge honor--!” His long forefinger was a fish-hook, reaching forPresident 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.” Thepresident was very suave, for so large and strong and hearty a man.
Gottlieb rode his wavering bicycle to the laboratory. It was bytelephone message from a brusque girl clerk in the president’s officethat he was informed that “his resignation had been accepted.”
He agonized, “Discharge me? They couldn’t! I’m the chief glory, the onlyglory, of this shopkeepers’ school!” When he comprehended thatapparently they very much had discharged him, he was shamed that heshould have given them a chance to kick him. But the really dismayingthing was that he should by an effort to be a politician haveinterrupted the sacred work.
He required peace and a laboratory, at once.
They’d see what fools they were when they heard that Harvard had calledhim!
He was eager for the mellower ways of Cambridge and Boston. Why had heremained so long in raw Mohalis? He wrote to Dr. Entwisle, hinting thathe was willing to hear an offer. He expected a telegram. He waited aweek, then had a long letter from Entwisle admitting that he had beenpremature in speaking for the Harvard faculty. Entwisle presented thefaculty’s compliments and their hope that some time they might have thehonor of his presence, but as things were now--
Gottlieb wrote to the University of West Chippewa that, after all, hewas willing to think about their medical deanship ... and had answerthat the place was filled, that they had not greatly liked the tone ofhis former letter, and they did not “care to go into the matterfurther.”
At sixty-one, Gottlieb had saved but a few hundred dollars--literally afew hundred. Like any bricklayer out of work, he had to have a job or gohungry. He was no longer a genius impatient of interrupted creation buta shabby schoolmaster in disgrace.
He prowled through his little brown house, fingering papers, staring athis wife, staring at old pictures, staring at nothing. He still had amonth of teaching--they had dated ahead the resignation which they hadwritten for him--but he was too dispirited to go to the laboratory. Hefelt unwanted, almost unsafe. His ancient sureness was broken intoself-pity. He waited from delivery to delivery for the mail. Surelythere would be aid from somebody who knew what he was, what he meant.There were many friendly letters about research, but the sort of menwith whom he corresponded did not listen to intercollegiate facultytattle 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 tooproud to write begging letters to the men who revered him. No, he wouldbe business-like! He applied to a Chicago teachers’ agency, and receiveda stilted answer promising to look about and inquiring whether he wouldcare to take the position of teacher of physics and chemistry in asuburban 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 thefear that she had cancer of the stomach. Now when she began to vomitblood, she cried to him for help. The Gottlieb who scoffed at medicalcredos, at “carpenters” and “pill mongers,” had forgotten what he knewof diagnosis, and when he was ill, or his family, he called for thedoctor as desperately as any backwoods layman to whom illness was theblack malignity of unknown devils.
In unbelievable simplicity he considered that, as his quarrel with Silvawas not personal, he could still summon him, and this time he wasjustified. Silva came, full of excessive benignity, chuckling tohimself, “When he’s got something the matter, he doesn’t run forArrhenhius or Jacques Loeb, but for me!” Into the meager cottage thelittle man brought strength, and Gottlieb gazed down on him trustingly.
Mrs. Gottlieb was suffering. Silva gave her morphine. Not withoutsatisfaction he learned that Gottlieb did not even know the dose. Heexamined her--his pudgy hands had the sensitiveness if not the precisionof Gottlieb’s skeleton fingers. He peered about the airless bedroom: thedark green curtains, the crucifix on the dumpy bureau, the color-printof a virtuously voluptuous maiden. He was bothered by an impression ofhaving recently been in the room. He remembered. It was the twin of thedoleful chamber of a German grocer whom he had seen during aconsultation 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 lowerborder of the ribs, and by the surface of the belly during deepbreathing.”
“Oh, yesss.”
“I don’t think you need to worry in the least. We’d better hustle heroff to the University Hospital, and we’ll give her a test meal and gether 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 wascapable of ordinary domestic affection, could not be discovered. Theneed 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 offerto teach chemistry to children. As he sat by her bed, his dark face wasblank, and the wrinkles which deepened across that mask may have beensorrow, may have been fear.... Nor is it known how, through the secureand uninvaded years, he had regarded his wife’s crucifix, which Silvahad spied on their bureau--a gaudy plaster crucifix on a box set withgilded shells.
Silva diagnosed it as probable gastric ulcer, and placed her ontreatment, with light and frequent meals. She improved, but she remainedin the hospital for four weeks, and Gottlieb wondered: Are these doctorsdeceiving us? Is it really cancer, which by Their mystic craft They areconcealing from me who know naught?
Robbed of her silent assuring presence on which night by weary night hehad depended, he fretted over his daughters, despaired at their noisypiano-practice, their inability to manage the slattern maid. When theyhad gone to bed he sat alone in the pale lamplight, unmoving, notreading. He was bewildered. His haughty self was like a robber baronfallen into the hands of rebellious slaves, stooped under a filthy load,the proud eye rheumy and patient with despair, the sword hand choppedoff, obscene flies crawling across the gnawed wrist.
It was at this time that he encountered Martin and Leora on the streetin Zenith.
He did not look back when they had passed him, but all that afternoon hebrooded on them. “That girl, maybe it was she that stole Martin fromme--from science! No! He was right. One sees what happens to the foolslike 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 countysuperintendent of schools. He was not much interested. Gottlieb lost histemper: “Do you make an endeavor to find positions for teachers, or doyou merely send out circulars to amuse yourself? Haf you looked up myrecord? Do you know who I am?”
The agent roared, “Oh, we know about you, all right, all right! I didn’twhen I first wrote you, but-- You seem to have a good record as alaboratory man, though I don’t see that you’ve produced anything of theslightest use in medicine. We had hoped to give you a chance such as younor nobody else ever had. John Edtooth, the Oklahoma oil magnate, hasdecided to found a university that for plant and endowment andindividuality will beat anything that’s ever been pulled off ineducation--biggest gymnasium in the world, with an ex-New York Giantfor baseball coach! We thought maybe we might work you in on thebacteriology 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. Fromsome good friends of ours, down Winnemac way. And we find that you’renot to be trusted with a position of real responsibility. Why, theyfired you for general incompetence! But now that you’ve had yourlesson-- Do you think you’d be competent to teach Practical Hygiene inEdtooth University?”
Gottlieb was so angry that he forgot to speak English, and as all hiscursing was in student German, in a creaky dry voice, the whole scenewas very funny indeed to the cackling bookkeeper and the girlstenographers. When he went from that place Max Gottlieb walked slowly,without purpose, and in his eyes were senile tears.
CHAPTER XIII
I
No one in the medical world had ever damned more heartily than Gottliebthe commercialism of certain large pharmaceutical firms, particularlyDawson T. Hunziker & Co., Inc., of Pittsburgh. The Hunziker Company wasan old and ethical house which dealt only with reputable doctors--orpractically only with reputable doctors. It furnished excellentantitoxins for diphtheria and tetanus, as well as the purest of officialpreparations, with the plainest and most official-looking labels on theswaggeringly modest brown bottles. Gottlieb had asserted that theyproduced doubtful vaccines, yet he returned from Chicago to write toDawson Hunziker that he was no longer interested in teaching, and hewould be willing to work for them on half time if he might use theirlaboratories, on possibly important research, for the rest of the day.
When the letter had gone he sat mumbling. He was certainly notaltogether sane. “Education! Biggest gymnasium in the world! Incapableof responsibility. Teaching I can do no more. But Hunziker will laugh atme. I haf told the truth about him and I shall haf to-- Dear Gott, whatshall I do?”
Into this still frenzy, while his frightened daughters peered at himfrom doorways, hope glided.
The telephone rang. He did not answer it. On the third irascible burringhe 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. FromPittsburgh. My dear fellow, we should be delighted to have you join ourstaff.”
“I-- But--”
“I believe you have criticized the pharmaceutical houses--oh, we readthe newspaper clippings very efficiently!--but we feel that when youcome to us and understand the Spirit of the Old Firm better, you’ll beenthusiastic. I hope, by the way, I’m not interrupting something.”
Thus, over certain hundreds of miles, from the gold and bluedrawing-room of his Sewickley home, Hunziker spoke to Max Gottliebsitting in his patched easy chair, and Gottlieb grated, with a forlorneffort at dignity:
“No, it iss all right.”
“Well--we shall be glad to offer you five thousand dollars a year, for astarter, and we shan’t worry about the half-time arrangement. We’ll giveyou all the space and technicians and material you need, and you just goahead and ignore us, and work out whatever seems important to you. Ouronly request is that if you do find any serums which are of real valueto the world, we shall have the privilege of manufacturing them, and ifwe lose money on ’em, it doesn’t matter. We like to make money, if wecan do it honestly, but our chief purpose is to serve mankind. Of courseif the serums pay, we shall be only too delighted to give you a generouscommission. Now about practical details--”
II
Gottlieb, the placidly virulent hater of religious rites, had areligious-seeming custom.
Often he knelt by his bed and let his mind run free. It was very muchlike prayer, though certainly there was no formal invocation, noconsciousness of a Supreme Being--other than Max Gottlieb. This night,as he knelt, with the wrinkles softening in his drawn face, hemeditated, “I was asinine that I should ever scold the commercialists!This salesman fellow, he has his feet on the ground. How much moreaut’entic the worst counter-jumper than frightened professors! Finedieners! Freedom! No teaching of imbeciles! _Du Heiliger!_”
But he had no contract with Dawson Hunziker.
III
In the medical periodicals the Dawson Hunziker Company publishedfull-page advertisem*nts, most starchy and refined in type, announcingthat Professor Max Gottlieb, perhaps the most distinguishedimmunologist in the world, had joined their staff.
In his Chicago clinic, one Dr. Rouncefield chuckled, “That’s whatbecomes 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 damnedpill-pedler? Why didn’t he come to us? Oh, well, if he didn’t wantto--_Voila!_ He is dead.”
In the village of Wheatsylvania, in North Dakota, a young doctorprotested to his wife, “Of all the people in the world! I wouldn’t havebelieved it! Max Gottlieb falling for those crooks!”
“I don’t care!” said his wife. “If he’s gone into business, he had somegood reason for it. I told you, I’d leave you for--”
“Oh, well,” sighingly, “give and forgive. I learned a lot from Gottlieband 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, wasarriving at the station in Pittsburgh, tugging a shabby wicker bag, animmigrant bundle, and a Bond Street dressing-case. From the train he hadstared up at the valiant Clifs, down to the smoke-tinged splendor ofthe river, and his heart was young. Here was fiery enterprise, not theflat land and flat minds of Winnemac. At the station-entrance everydingy taxicab seemed radiant to him, and he marched forth a conqueror.
IV
In the Dawson Hunziker building, Gottlieb found such laboratories as hehad never planned, and instead of student assistants he had an expertwho himself had taught bacteriology, as well as three swift technicians,one of them German-trained. He was received with acclaim in the privateoffice of Hunziker, which was remarkably like a minor cathedral.Hunziker was bald and business-like as to skull but tortoise-spectacledand sentimental of eye. He stood up at his Jacobean desk, gave Gottlieba Havana cigar, and told him that they had awaited him pantingly.
In the enormous staff dining-room Gottlieb found scores of competentyoung chemists and biologists who treated him with reverence. He likedthem. If they talked too much of money--of how much this new tincture ofcinchona ought to sell, and how soon their salaries would beincreased--yet they were free of the careful pomposities of collegeinstructors. As a youngster, the cap-tilted young Max had been alaughing man, and now in gusty arguments his laughter came back.
His wife seemed better; his daughter Miriam found an excellent pianoteacher; the boy Robert entered college that autumn; they had a spaciousthough decrepit house; the relief from the droning and the annuallyrepeated, inevitable routine of the classroom was exhilarating; andGottlieb had never in his life worked so well. He was unconscious ofeverything outside of his laboratory and a few theaters andconcert-halls.
Six months passed before he realized that the young technical expertsresented what he considered his jolly thrusts at their commercialism.They were tired of his mathematical enthusiasms and some of them viewedhim as an old bore, muttered of him as a Jew. He was hurt, for he likedto be merry with fellow workers. He began to ask questions and toexplore the Hunziker building. He had seen nothing of it save hislaboratory, a corridor or two, the dining-room, and Hunziker’s office.
However abstracted and impractical, Gottlieb would have made anexcellent Sherlock Holmes--if anybody who would have made an excellentSherlock Holmes would have been willing to be a detective. His mindburned through appearances to actuality. He discovered now that theDawson Hunziker Company was quite all he had asserted in earlier days.They did make excellent antitoxins and ethical preparations, but theywere also producing a new “cancer remedy” manufactured from the orchid,pontifically recommended and possessing all the value of mud. And tovarious billboard-advertising beauty companies they sold millions ofbottles of a complexion-cream guaranteed to turn a Canadian Indian guideas lily-fair as the angels. This treasure cost six cents a bottle tomake and a dollar over the counter, and the name of Dawson Hunziker wasnever connected with it.
It was at this time that Gottlieb succeeded in his masterwork aftertwenty years of seeking. He produced antitoxin in the test-tube, whichmeant that it would be possible to immunize against certain diseaseswithout tediously making sera by the inoculation of animals. It was arevolution, the revolution, in immunology ... if he was right.
He revealed it at a dinner for which Hunziker had captured a general, acollege president, and a pioneer aviator. It was an expansive dinner,with admirable hock, the first decent German wine Gottlieb had drunk inyears. He twirled the slender green glass affectionately; he came out ofhis dreams and became excited, gay, demanding. They applauded him andfor an hour he was a Great Scientist. Of them all, Hunziker was mostgenerous in his praise. Gottlieb wondered if some one had not trickedthis good bald man into intrigues with the beautifiers.
Hunziker summoned him to the office next day. Hunziker did his summoningvery well indeed (unless it happened to be merely a stenographer). Hesent a glossy morning-coated male secretary, who presented Mr.Hunziker’s compliments to the much less glossy Dr. Gottlieb, and hintedwith the delicacy of a lilac bud that if it was quite altogetherconvenient, if it would not in the least interfere with Dr. Gottlieb’sexperiments, Mr. Hunziker would be flattered to see him in the office ata quarter after three.
When Gottlieb rambled in, Hunziker motioned the secretary out ofexistence 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 wefeel it’s the time to strike. We’ll patent your method of synthesizingantibodies and immediately put them on the market in large quantities,with a great big advertising campaign--you know--not circus it, ofcourse--strictly high-class ethical advertising. We’ll start withanti-diphtheria serum. By the way, when you receive your next checkyou’ll find we’ve raised your honorarium to seven thousand a year.”Hunziker was a large purring puss*, now, and Gottlieb death-still. “NeedI say, my dear fellow, that if there’s the demand I anticipate, you willhave 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 serologicalprocesses. They should be open to all laboratories. And I am stronglyagainst premature production or even announcement. I think I am right,but I must check my technique, perhaps improve it--be _sure_. Then, Ishould think, there should be no objection to market production, but inve-ry small quantities and in fair competition with others, not underpatents, as if this was a dinglebat toy for the Christmas tradings!”
“My dear fellow, I quite sympathize. Personally I should like nothing somuch as to spend my whole life in just producing one pricelessscientific discovery, without consideration of mere profit. But we haveour duty toward the stockholders of the Dawson Hunziker Company to makemoney for them. Do you realize that they have--and many of them are poorwidows and orphans--invested their Little All in our stock, and that wemust keep faith? I am helpless; I am but their Humble Servant. And onthe other side: I think we’ve treated you rather well, Dr. Gottlieb, andwe’ve given you complete freedom. And we intend to go on treating youwell! Why, man, you’ll be rich; you’ll be one of us! I don’t like tomake any demands, but on this point it’s my duty to insist, and I shallexpect you at the earliest possible moment to start manufacturing--”
Gottlieb was sixty-two. The defeat at Winnemac had done something to hiscourage.... And he had no contract with Hunziker.
He protested shakily, but as he crawled back to his laboratory it seemedimpossible for him to leave this sanctuary and face the murderousbrawling world, and quite as impossible to tolerate a cheapened andineffective imitation of his antitoxin. He began, that hour, a sordidstrategy which his old proud self would have called inconceivable; hebegan to equivocate, to put off announcement and production till heshould have “cleared up a few points,” while week on week Hunzikerbecame more threatening. Meantime he prepared for disaster. He moved hisfamily 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 thereseemed to be no reason for arrogance, longed for by the anemic, milkysort of girls, yet ever supercilious to them. While his father wasalternately proud and amiably sardonic about his own Jewish blood, theboy conveyed to his classmates in college that he was from pure andprobably noble German stock. He was welcomed, or half welcomed, in amotoring, poker-playing, country-club set, and he had to have moremoney. Gottlieb missed twenty dollars from his desk. He who ridiculedconventional honor had the honor, as he had the pride, of a savage oldsquire. A new misery stained his incessant bitterness at having todeceive Hunziker. He faced Robert with, “My boy, did you take the moneyfrom my desk?”
Few youngsters could have faced that jut of his hawk nose, thered-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 someclothes and stuff. It’s your fault. You bring me up to train with a lotof fellows that have all the cash in the world, and then you expect meto dress like a hobo!”
“Stealing--”
“Rats! What’s stealing! You’re always making fun of these preachers thattalk about Sin and Truth and Honesty and all those words that’ve beenused so much they don’t mean a darn’ thing and-- I don’t care! DawsHunziker, the old man’s son, he told me his dad said you could be amillionaire, and then you keep us strapped like this, and Mom sick-- Letme tell you, back in Mohalis Mom used to slip me a couple of dollarsalmost every week and-- I’m tired of it! If you’re going to keep me inrags, I’m going to cut out college!”
Gottlieb stormed, but there was no force in it. He did not know, all thenext fortnight, what his son was going to do, what himself was going todo.
Then, so quietly that not till they had returned from the cemetery didthey realize her passing, his wife died, and the next week his oldestdaughter ran off with a worthless laughing fellow who lived by gambling.
Gottlieb sat alone. Over and over he read the Book of Job. “Truly theLord 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 occurto him to believe them, or to stoop in fear before their God ofWrath--or to gain ease by permitting Hunziker to defile his discovery.
He arose, in time, and went silently to his laboratory. His experimentswere as careful as ever, and his assistants saw no change save that hedid not lunch in hall. He walked blocks away, to a vile restaurant atwhich he could save thirty cents a day.
V
Out of the dimness which obscured the people about him, Miriam emerged.
She was eighteen, the youngest of his brood, squat, and in no way comelysave 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 spokerarely. She dropped her piano lessons, discharged the maid, studied thecook-book, and prepared for him the fat crisp dishes that he loved. Herregret was that she had never learned German, for he dropped now andthen into the speech of his boyhood.
He eyed her, and at length: “So! One is with me. Could you endure thepoverty 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 Hunzikernext paraded into the laboratory, demanding, “Now look here. We’vefussed long enough. We got to put your stuff on the market,” thenGottlieb answered, “No. If you wait till I have done all I can--maybeone 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 Instituteof Biology, of New York, was brought to him.
Gottlieb knew of Tubbs. He had never visited McGurk but he consideredit, next to Rockefeller and McCormick, the soundest and freestorganization for pure scientific research in the country, and if he hadpictured a Heavenly laboratory in which good scientists might spendeternity in happy and thoroughly impractical research, he would havedevised it in the likeness of McGurk. He was mildly pleased that itsdirector should have called on him.
Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs was tremendously whiskered on all visible spots savehis nose and temples and the palms of his hands, short but passionatelywhiskered, like a Scotch terrier. Yet they were not comic whiskers; theywere the whiskers of dignity; and his eyes were serious, his step anearnest trot, his voice a piping solemnity.
“Dr. Gottlieb, this is a great pleasure. I have heard your papers at theAcademy of Sciences but, to my own loss, I have hitherto failed to havean introduction to you.”
Gottlieb tried not to sound embarrassed.
Tubbs looked at the assistants, like a plotter in a political play, andhinted, “May we have a talk--”
Gottlieb led him to his office, overlooking a vast bustle of sidetracks,of curving rails and brown freight-cars, and Tubbs urged:
“It has come to our attention, by a curious chance, that you are on theeve of your most significant discovery. We all wondered, when you leftacademic work, at your decision to enter the commercial field. We wishedthat 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 tothe commercial side of things, and that tempts us to wonder whether youcould be persuaded to join us at McGurk. So I just sprang on a train andran down here. We should be delighted to have you become a member of theinstitute, and chief of the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology.Mr. McGurk and I desire nothing but the advancement of science. Youwould, of course, have absolute freedom as to what researches youthought it best to pursue, and I think we could provide as goodassistance and material as would be obtainable anywhere in the world. Inregard to salary--permit me to be business-like and perhaps blunt, as mytrain leaves in one hour-- I don’t suppose we could equal the doubtlesslarge emolument which the Hunziker people are able to pay you, but wecan go to ten thousand dollars a year--”
“Oh, my God, do not talk of the money! I shall be wit’ you in New Yorkone week from to-day. You see,” said Gottlieb, “I haf no contracthere!”
CHAPTER XIV
I
All afternoon they drove in the flapping buggy across the longundulations of the prairie. To their wandering there was no barrier,neither lake nor mountain nor factory-bristling city, and the breezeabout them was flowing sunshine.
Martin cried to Leora, “I feel as if all the Zenith dust and hospitallint 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 themsweep across the wheat, his sun-drowsed spirit was part of the greatland, and he was almost freed of the impatience with which he hadstarted 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 skippingfrom a one-room schoolhouse, and cackled, “Say, you folks better notforget to be back at six o’clock for supper or the Old Man’ll have afit. He’ll expect you for supper at six o’clock sharp, and when he sayssix 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 inWheatsylvania I remember three different times when supper was as lateas seven minutes after six. Let’s get out of this, Sandy.... I wonderwere we so wise to live with the family and save money?”
Before they had escaped from the not very extensive limits ofWheatsylvania they passed Ada Quist, the future Mrs. Bert Tozer, andthrough the lazy air they heard her voice slashing: “Better be home bysix.”
Martin would be heroic. “We’ll by golly get back when we’re by gollygood and ready!” he said to Leora; but on them both was the cumulativedread of the fussing voices, beyond every breezy prospect was the order,“Be back at six sharp”; and they whipped up to arrive at eleven minutesto six, as Mr. Tozer was returning from the creamery, full thirtyseconds later than usual.
“Glad to see you among us,” he said. “Hustle now and get that horse inthe livery stable. Supper’s at six--sharp!”
Martin survived it sufficiently to sound domestic when he announced atthe supper-table:
“We had a bully drive. I’m going to like it here. Well, I’ve loafed fora day and a half, and now I’ve got to get busy. First thing is, I mustfind a location for my office. What is there vacant, Father Tozer?”
Mrs. Tozer said brightly, “Oh, I have such a nice idea, Martin. Whycan’t we fix up an office for you out in the barn? It’d be so handy tothe house, for you to get to meals on time, and you could keep an eye onthe house if the girl was out and Ory and I went out visiting or to theEmbroidery Circle.”
“In the barn!”
“Why, yes, in the old harness room. It’s partly ceiled, and we could putin some nice tar paper or even beaver board.”
“Mother Tozer, what the dickens do you think I’m planning to do? I’m nota hired man in a livery stable, or a kid looking for a place to put hisbirds’ 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 myhand! I intend--”
“Look here, Mart,” said Bertie. “As we’re putting up the money-- I don’twant to be a tightwad but after all, a dollar is a dollar--if we furnishthe dough, we’ve got to decide the best way to spend it.”
Mr. Tozer looked thoughtful and said helplessly, “That’s so. No sensetaking a risk, with the blame’ farmers demanding all the money they canget for their wheat and cream, and then deliberately going to work andnot paying the interest on their loans. I swear, it don’t hardly pay toinvest in mortgages any longer. No sense putting on lugs. Stands toreason you can look at a fellow’s sore throat or prescribe for anear-ache just as well in a nice simple little office as in some foolplace all fixed up like a Moorhead saloon. Mother will see you have acomfortable corner in the barn--”
Leora intruded: “Look here, Papa. I want you to lend us one thousanddollars, 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’senough.”
“And mortgages bringing six, seven, and eight!” Bert quavered.
“Five’s enough. And we want our own say, absolute, as to how we useit--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 tolend you some money, but you’ll blame well come to us for it from timeto time, and you’ll blame well take our advice--”
Leora rose. “Either you do what I say, just exactly what I say, or Martand I take the first train and go back to Zenith, and I mean it! Plentyof places open for him there, with a big salary, so we won’t have to bedependent on anybody!”
There was much conversation, most of which sounded like all the rest ofit. Once Leora started for the stairs, to go up and pack; once Martinand she stood waving their napkins as they shook their fists, thegeneral composition remarkably like the Laocoön.
Leora won.
They settled down to the most solacing fussing.
“Did you bring your trunk up from the depot?” asked Mr. Tozer.
“No sense leaving it there--paying two bits a day storage!” fumed Bert.
“I got it up this morning,” said Martin.
“Oh, yes, Martin had it brought up this morning,” agreed Mrs. Tozer.
“You had it brought? Didn’t you bring it up yourself?” agonized Mr.Tozer.
“No. I had the fellow that runs the lumberyard haul it up for me,” saidMartin.
“Well, gosh almighty, you could just as well’ve put it on a wheelbarrowand 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 awheelbarrow 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 isawful’ 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’vegone 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 barnon your brain. You move your old bank there, and Martin’ll take the bankbuilding 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 andfussing like that? When do you think you’ll have your trunk unpacked,Mart?” Mr. Tozer could consider barns and he could consider trunks buthis was not a brain to grasp two such complicated matters at the sametime.
“I can get it unpacked to-night, if it makes any difference--”
“Well, I don’t suppose it really makes any special difference, but whenyou 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 thebarn, he can’t take a month of Sundays getting unpacked and--”
“Oh, good Lord, I’ll get it done to-night--”
“And I think we can get it in the attic--”
“I tell you it’s jam full already--”
“We’ll go take a look at it after supper--”
“Well now, I tell you when I tried to get that duck-boat in--”
Martin probably did not scream, but he heard himself screaming. The freeand virile land was leagues away and for years forgotten.
II
To find an office took a fortnight of diplomacy, and of discussionbrightening three meals a day, every day. (Not that office-finding wasthe only thing the Tozers mentioned. They went thoroughly into everymoment of Martin’s day; they commented on his digestion, his mail, hiswalks, his shoes that needed cobbling, and whether he had yet taken themto the farmer-trapper-cobbler, and how much the cobbling ought to cost,and the presumable theology, politics, and marital relations of thecobbler.)
Mr. Tozer had from the first known the perfect office. The Norblomslived above their general store, and Mr. Tozer knew that the Norblomswere thinking of moving. There was indeed nothing that was happening orlikely to happen in Wheatsylvania which Mr. Tozer did not know andexplain. Mrs. Norblom was tired of keeping house, and she wanted to goto Mrs. Beeson’s boarding house (to the front room, on the right as youwent along the up-stairs hall, the room with the plaster walls and thenice little stove that Mrs. Beeson bought from Otto Krag for sevendollars and thirty-five cents--no, seven and a quarter it was).
They called on the Norbloms and Mr. Tozer hinted that “it might be nicefor the Doctor to locate over the store, if the Norbloms were thinkingof making any change--”
The Norbloms stared at each other, with long, bleached, cautious,Scandinavian stares, and grumbled that they “didn’t _know_--of course itwas the finest location in town--” Mr. Norblom admitted that if, againstall probability, they ever considered moving, they would probably asktwenty-five dollars a month for the flat, unfurnished.
Mr. Tozer came out of the international conference as craftily joyful asany Mr. Secretary Tozer or Lord Tozer in Washington or London:
“Fine! Fine! We made him commit himself! Twenty-five, he says. Thatmeans, when the time’s ripe, we’ll offer him eighteen and close fortwenty-one-seventy-five. If we just handle him careful, and give himtime to go see Mrs. Beeson and fix up about boarding with her, we’llhave him just where we want him!”
“Oh, if the Norbloms can’t make up their minds, then let’s try somethingelse,” 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 thinkwe’re serious, and make enemies of ’em for life? Now that would be afine way to start building up a practise, wouldn’t it! And I must say Iwouldn’t blame the Norbloms one bit for getting wild if you let ’emdown like that. This ain’t Zenith, where you can go yelling aroundexpecting to get things done in two minutes!”
Through a fortnight, while the Norbloms agonized over deciding to dowhat they had long ago decided to do, Martin waited, unable to beginwork. Until he should open a certified and recognizable office, most ofthe village did not regard him as a competent physician but as “thatson-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 ofAlec Ingleblad the barber. He was delighted, till Bert Tozer explained:
“Oh, so _she_ called you in, eh? She’s always doctorin’ around. Thereain’t a thing the matter with her, but she’s always trying out thelatest stunt. Last time it was a fellow that come through here sellingpills and liniments out of a Ford, and the time before that it was afaith-healer, crazy loon up here at Dutchman’s Forge, and then for quitea spell she doctored with an osteopath in Leopolis--though I tell youthere’s something to this osteopathy--they cure a lot of folks that youregular docs can’t seem to find out what’s the matter with ’em, don’tyou think so?”
Martin remarked that he did not think so.
“Oh, you docs!” Bert crowed in his most jocund manner, for Bert could bevery joky and bright. “You’re all alike, especially when you’re just outof school and think you know it all. You can’t see any good inchiropractic or electric belts or bone-setters or anything, because theytake so many good dollars away from you.”
Then behold the Dr. Martin Arrowsmith who had once infuriated Angus Duerand Irving Watters by his sarcasm on medical standards upholding to alewdly grinning Bert Tozer the benevolence and scientific knowledge ofall doctors; proclaiming that no medicine had ever (at least by anyWinnemac graduate) been prescribed in vain nor any operation needlesslyperformed.
He saw a good deal of Bert now. He sat about the bank, hoping to becalled on a case, his fingers itching for bandages. Ada Quist came inwith 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 allthat mind-reading stuff he knows. How about it, Mart? I’m getting soscared that I’ve changed the combination on the safe.”
“Heh!” said Ada. “He may fool some folks but he can’t fool me. Anybodycan learn things in books, but when it comes to practising ’em-- Let metell 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 traininghad made him so “gosh-awful’ smart that he sticks up his nose at us poorhicks 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 aboutthe 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’llhave 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 couldnot endure another week. He could not wait for the Norbloms to make uptheir minds, though they had become to him dread and eternal figureswhose enmity would crush him; prodigious gods shadowing thisWheatsylvania which was the only perceptible world.
He was aware, in the late sad light, that a man was tramping the plankwalk before the house, hesitating and peering at him. The man was oneWise, a Russian Jew known to the village as “Wise the Polack.” In hisshack 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 totalk to you about. Or say, come on over to my place and sample some newcigars 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 blockfrom Main Street, with nothing but the railroad track between it andopen wheat country. It was lined with pine, pleasant-smelling under thestench of old pipe-smoke. Wise winked--he was a confidential,untrustworthy wisp of a man--and murmured, “Think you could stand alittle 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 ofhis desk brought up a bottle out of which they both drank, wiping themouth of the bottle with circling palms. Then Wise, abruptly:
“Look here, Doc. You’re not like these hicks; you understand thatsometimes a fellow gets mixed up in crooked business he didn’t intendto. Well, make a long story short, I guess I’ve sold too much miningstock, and they’ll be coming down on me. I’ve got to be moving--curseit--hoped I could stay settled for couple of years, this time. Well, Ihear you’re looking for an office. This place would be ideal. Ideal! Tworooms at the back besides this one. I’ll rent it to you, furniture andthe whole shooting-match, for fifteen dollars a month, if you’ll pay meone year in advance. Oh, this ain’t phony. Your brother-in-law knows allabout my ownership.”
Martin tried to be very business-like. Was he not a young doctor whowould soon be investing money, one of the most Substantial Citizens inWheatsylvania? He returned home, and under the parlor lamp, with itsgreen daisies on pink glass, the Tozers listened acutely, Bert stoopingforward with open mouth.
“You’d be safe renting it for a year, but that ain’t the point,” saidBert.
“It certainly isn’t! Antagonize the Norbloms, now that they’ve almostmade up their minds to let you have their place? Make me a fool, afterall the trouble I’ve taken?” groaned Mr. Tozer.
They went over it and over it till almost ten o’clock, but Martin wasresolute, and the next day he rented Wise’s shack.
For the first time in his life he had a place utterly his own, his andLeora’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 sunsethe sat on the back stoop (a very interesting and not too brokensoap-box) and from the flamboyant horizon the open country flowed acrossthe thin band of the railroad to his feet. Suddenly Leora was besidehim, her arm round his neck, and he hymned all the glory of theirfuture:
“Know what I found in the kitchen here? A dandy old auger, hardly rustya bit, and I can take a box and make a test-tube rack ... of my own!”
CHAPTER XV
I
With none of the profane observations on “medical pedlers” which hadannoyed Digamma Pi, Martin studied the catalogue of the New IdeaInstrument and Furniture Company, of Jersey City. It was a handsomething. On the glossy green cover, in red and black, were the portraitsof the president, a round quippish man who loved all young physicians;the general manager, a cadaverous scholarly man who surely gave all hislaborious nights and days to the advancement of science; and thevice-president, Martin’s former preceptor, Dr. Roscoe Geake, who had alively, eye-glassed, forward-looking modernity all his own. The coveralso contained, in surprisingly small space, a quantity of poetic prose,and the inspiring promise:
Doctor, don’t be buffaloed by the unenterprising. No reason why YOU should lack the equipment which impresses patients, makes practise easy, and brings honor and riches. All the high-class supplies which distinguish the Leaders of the Profession from the Dubs are within YOUR reach right NOW by the famous New Idea Financial System: ‘Just a little down and the rest FREE--out of the increased earnings which New Idea apparatus will bring you!”
Above, in a border of laurel wreaths and Ionic capitals, was thechallenge:
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, wasequally arousing. It presented illustrations of the BindledorfTonsillectomy 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 waslike his opinion of electric cabinets, but excitedly he ordered a steelstand, a sterilizer, flasks, test-tubes, and a white-enameled mechanismwith enchanting levers and gears which transformed it fromexamining-chair to operating-table. He yearned over the picture of acentrifuge while Leora was admiring the “stunning seven-piece ReceptionRoom fumed oak set, upholstered in genuine Barcelona LongwareLeatherette, will give your office the class and distinction of anyhigh-grade New York specialist’s.”
“Aw, let ’em sit on plain chairs,” Martin grunted.
In the attic Mrs. Tozer found enough seedy chairs for thereception-room, and an ancient bookcase which, when Leora had lined itwith pink fringed paper, became a noble instrument-cabinet. Till theexamining-chair should arrive, Martin would use Wise’s lumpy couch, andLeora busily covered it with white oilcloth. Behind the front room ofthe tiny office-building were two cubicles, formerly bedroom andkitchen. Martin made them into consultation-room and laboratory.Whistling, he sawed out racks for the glassware and turned the oven of adiscarded kerosene stove into a hot-air oven for sterilizing glassware.
“But understand, Lee, I’m not going to go monkeying with any scientificresearch. I’m through with all that.”
Leora smiled innocently. While he worked she sat outside in the longwild grass, sniffing the prairie breeze, her hands about her ankles, butevery 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 treasureto the office and nailed it in place. It was a plate-glass sign; on itin gold letters, “M. Arrowsmith, M.D.” They looked up, arms abouteach other, squealing softly, and in reverence he grunted,“There--by--jiminy!”
They sat on the back stoop, exulting in freedom from Tozers. Along therailroad bumped a freight train with a cheerful clanking. The firemanwaved to them from the engine, a brakeman from the platform of the redcaboose. After the train there was silence but for the crickets and adistant frog.
“I’ve never been so happy,” he murmured.
III
He had brought from Zenith his own Ochsner surgical case. As he laid outthe instruments he admired the thin, sharp, shining bistoury, the strongtenotome, the delicate curved needles. With them was a dental forceps.Dad Silva had warned his classes, “Don’t forget the country doctor oftenhas to be not only physician but dentist, yes, and priest, divorcelawyer, blacksmith, chauffeur, and road engineer, and if you are toolily-handed for those trades, don’t get out of sight of a trolley lineand a beauty parlor.” And the first patient whom Martin had in the newoffice, the second patient in Wheatsylvania, was Nils Krag, thecarpenter, roaring with an ulcerated tooth. This was a week before theglass sign was up, and Martin rejoiced to Leora, “Begun already! You’llsee ’em tumbling in now.”
They did not see them tumbling in. For ten days Martin tinkered at hishot-air oven or sat at his desk, reading and trying to look busy. Hisfirst joy passed into fretfulness, and he could have yelped at thestillness, the inactivity.
Late one afternoon, when he was in a melancholy way preparing to gohome, into the office stamped a grizzled Swedish farmer who grumbled,“Doc, I got a fish-hook caught in my thumb and it’s all swole.” ToArrowsmith, intern in Zenith General Hospital with its out-patientclinic treating hundreds a day, the dressing of a hand had been lessimportant than borrowing a match, but to Dr. Arrowsmith of Wheatsylvaniait was a hectic operation, and the farmer a person remarkable and verycharming. Martin shook his left hand violently and burbled, “Now ifthere’s anything, you just ’phone me--you just ’phone me.”
There had been, he felt, a rush of admiring patients sufficient tojustify them in the one thing Leora and he longed to do, the thing aboutwhich they whispered at night: the purchase of a motor car for hiscountry calls.
They had seen the car at Frazier’s store.
It was a Ford, five years old, with torn upholstery, a gummy motor, andsprings made by a blacksmith who had never made springs before. Next tothe chugging of the gas engine at the creamery, the most familiar soundin Wheatsylvania was Frazier’s closing the door of his Ford. He bangedit flatly at the store, and usually he had to shut it thrice againbefore he reached home.
But to Martin and Leora, when they had tremblingly bought the car andthree 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 theFord station wagon, but it was Leora’s first venture. Bert had given herso many directions that she had refused to drive the family Overland.When she first sat at the steering wheel, when she moved thehand-throttle with her little finger and felt in her own hands all thispower, sorcery enabling her to go as fast as she might desire (withindistinct limits), she transcended human strength, she felt that shecould fly like the wild goose--and then in a stretch of sand she killedthe engine.
Martin became the demon driver of the village. To ride with him was tosit holding your hat, your eyes closed, waiting for death. Apparently heaccelerated for corners, to make them more interesting. The sight ofanything on the road ahead, from another motor to a yellow pup, stirredin 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. Itis possible that half of the first dozen patients who drifted into hisoffice came because of awe at his driving ... the rest because there wasnothing serious the matter, and he was nearer than Dr. Hesselink atGroningen.
IV
With his first admirers he developed his first enemies.
When he met the Norbloms on the street (and in Wheatsylvania it isdifficult not to meet every one on the street every day), they glared.Then he antagonized Pete Yeska.
Pete conducted what he called a “drug store,” devoted to the sale ofcandy, soda water, patent medicines, fly paper, magazines,washing-machines, and Ford accessories, yet Pete would have starved ifhe had not been postmaster also. He alleged that he was a licensedpharmacist but he so mangled prescriptions that Martin burst into thestore and addressed him piously.
“You young docs make me sick,” said Pete. “I was putting upprescriptions when you was in the cradle. The old doc that used to behere sent everything to me. My way o’ doing things suits me, and I don’tfigure on changing it for you or any other half-baked youngstring-bean.”
Thereafter Martin had to purchase drugs from St. Paul, overcrowd histiny laboratory, and prepare his own pills and ointments, looking in ahomesick way at the rarely used test-tubes and the dust gathering on thebell glass of his microscope, while Pete Yeska joined with the Norblomsin whispering, “This new doc here ain’t any good. You better stick toHesselink.”
V
So blank, so idle, had been the week that when he heard the telephone atthe Tozers’, at three in the morning, he rushed to it as though he wereawaiting 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. Mylittle girl, Mary, she has a terrible sore throat. I think maybe it iscroup 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 Leorabeamed over the first night call. He furiously cranked the Ford, bangedand clattered past the station and into the wheat prairie. When he hadgone six miles by the speedometer, slackening at each rural box to lookfor the owner’s name, he realized that he was lost. He ran into a farmdriveway and stopped under the willows, his headlight on a heap ofdented milk-cans, broken harvester wheels, cordwood, and bamboofishing-poles. From the barn dashed a woolly anomalous dog, barkingviciously, 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 nearhis place. You yoost turn back one mile and turn to the right by thebrick schoolhouse, and it’s about forty rods up the road--the house witha 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” hasever failed to miss it.
Martin swung the Ford about, grazing a slashed chopping-block; herattled up the road, took the corner that side of the schoolhouseinstead of this, ran half a mile along a boggy trail between pastures,and stopped at a farmhouse. In the surprising fall of silence, cows wereto be heard feeding, and a white horse, startled in the darkness, raisedits head to wonder at him. He had to arouse the house with wildsquawkings 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 rushedinto 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 wallsand pale varnished pine. Only an iron bed, a straight chair, a chromo ofSt. Anne, and a shadeless hand-lamp on a rickety stand broke the staringshininess of the apartment, a recent extension of the farmhouse. Aheavy-shouldered woman was kneeling by the bed. As she lifted her wetred face, Novak urged:
“Don’t cry now; he’s here!” And to Martin: “The little one is pretty badbut we done all we could for her. Last night and to-night we steam herthroat, and we put her here in our own bedroom!”
Mary was a child of seven or eight. Martin found her lips andfinger-tips blue, but in her face no flush. In the effort to expel herbreath she writhed into terrifying knots, then coughed up saliva dottedwith grayish specks. Martin worried as he took out his clinicalthermometer 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 leisurelyprecision. Silva the healer bulked in the room, crowding out Gottliebthe inhuman perfectionist. Martin leaned nervously over the child on thetousled bed, absent-mindedly trying her pulse again and again. He felthelpless without the equipment of Zenith General, its nurses and AngusDuer’s sure advice. He had a sudden respect for the lone country doctor.
He had to make a decision, irrevocable, perhaps perilous. He would usediphtheria antitoxin. But certainly he could not obtain it from PeteYeska’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 picturedBlassner driving through the night, respectfully bringing the antitoxinto The Doctor. While Novak bellowed into the farm-line telephone, in thedining-room, Martin waited--waited--staring at the child; Mrs. Novakwaited for him to do miracles; the child’s tossing and hoarse gaspingbecame horrible; and the glaring walls, the glaring lines of pale yellowwoodwork, hypnotized him into sleepiness. It was too late for anythingshort of antitoxin or tracheotomy. Should he operate; cut into thewind-pipe that she might breathe? He stood and worried; he drowned insleepiness and shook himself awake. He had to do something, with themother kneeling there, gaping at him, beginning to look doubtful.
“Get some hot cloths--towels, napkins--and keep ’em around her neck. Iwish to God he’d get that telephone call!” he fretted.
As Mrs. Novak, padding on thick slippered feet, brought in the hotcloths, 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 haveantitoxin. Going to drive t’ Leopolis and get it. You keep up these hotapplications and-- Wish we had an atomizer. And room ought to bemoister. Got ’n alcohol stove? Keep some water boiling in here. No useof medicine. B’ right back.”
He drove the twenty-four miles to Leopolis in thirty-seven minutes. Notonce did he slow down for a cross-road. He defied the curves, the rootsthrusting out into the road, though always one dark spot in his mindfeared a blow-out and a swerve. The speed, the casting away of allcaution, wrought in him a high exultation, and it was blessed to be inthe cool air and alone, after the strain of Mrs. Novak’s watching. Inhis mind all the while was the page in Osler regarding diphtheria, thevery picture of the words: “In severe cases the first dose should befrom 8,000--” No. Oh, yes: “--from 10,000 to 15,000 units.”
He regained confidence. He thanked the god of science for antitoxin andfor 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!” herejoiced.
He approached a grade crossing and hurled toward it, ignoring possibletrains. He was aware of a devouring whistle, saw sliding light on therails, and brought up sharp. Past him, ten feet from his front wheels,flung the Seattle Express like a flying volcano. The fireman wasstoking, and even in the thin clearness of coming dawn the glow from thefire-box was appalling on the under side of the rolling smoke. Instantlythe apparition was gone and Martin sat trembling, hands trembling on thelittle steering-wheel, foot trembling like St. Vitus’s dance on thebrake. “That was an awful’ close thing!” he muttered, and thought of awidowed Leora, abandoned to Tozers. But the vision of the Novak child,struggling for each terrible breath, overrode all else. “Hell! I’vekilled the engine!” he groaned. He vaulted over the side, cranked thecar, and dashed into Leopolis.
To Crynssen County, Leopolis with its four thousand people was ametropolis, but in the pinched stillness of the dawn it was a tinygraveyard: Main Street a sandy expanse, the low shops desolate as huts.He found one place astir; in the bleak office of the Dakota Hotel thenight clerk was playing poker with the ’bus-driver and the townpoliceman.
They wondered at his hysterical entrance.
“Dr. Arrowsmith, from Wheatsylvania. Kid dying from diphtheria. Where’sBlassner live? Jump in my car and show me.”
The constable was a lanky old man, his vest swinging open over acollarless shirt, his trousers in folds, his eyes resolute. He guidedMartin to the home of the druggist, he kicked the door, then, standingwith his lean and bristly visage upraised in the cold early light, hebawled, “Ed! Hey, you, Ed! Come out of it!”
Ed Blassner grumbled from the up-stairs window. To him, death andfurious doctors had small novelty. While he drew on his trousers andcoat he was to be heard discoursing to his drowsy wife on the woes ofdruggists and the desirability of moving to Los Angeles and going intoreal estate. But he did have diphtheria antitoxin in his shop, andsixteen minutes after Martin’s escape from being killed by a train hewas speeding to Henry Novak’s.
VI
The child was still alive when he came bruskly into the house.
All the way back he had seen her dead and stiff. He grunted “Thank God!”and angrily called for hot water. He was no longer the embarrassed cubdoctor but the wise and heroic physician who had won the Race withDeath, and in the peasant eyes of Mrs. Novak, in Henry’s nervousobedience, he read his power.
Swiftly, smoothly, he made intravenous injection of the antitoxin, andstood expectant.
The child’s breathing did not at first vary, as she choked in the laborof expelling her breath. There was a gurgle, a struggle in which herface blackened, and she was still. Martin peered, incredulous. Slowlythe Novaks began to glower, shaky hands at their lips. Slowly they knewthe child was gone.
In the hospital, death had become indifferent and natural to Martin. Hehad said to Angus, he had heard nurses say one to another, quitecheerfully, “Well, fifty-seven has just passed out.” Now he raged withdesire to do the impossible. She _couldn’t_ be dead. He’d dosomething-- All the while he was groaning, “I should’ve operated-- Ishould have.” So insistent was the thought that for a time he did notrealize 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 wecould call the priest!”
He crawled past her lamentations and the man’s sorrow, and drove home,empty of heart.
“I shall never practise medicine again,” he reflected.
“I’m through,” he said to Leora. “I’m no good. I should of operated. Ican’t face people, when they know about it. I’m through. I’ll go get alab job-- Dawson Hunziker or some place.”
Salutary was the tartness with which she protested, “You’re the mostconceited man that ever lived! Do you think you’re the only doctor thatever lost a patient? I know you did everything you could.” But he wentabout next day torturing himself, the more tortured when Mr. Tozerwhined at supper, “Henry Novak and his woman was in town to-day. Theysay you ought to have saved their girl. Why didn’t you give your mind toit 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 Hunkyfarmers.”
After a night when he was too tired to sleep, Martin suddenly drove toLeopolis.
From the Tozers he had heard almost religious praise of Dr. Adam Winterof Leopolis, a man of nearly seventy, the pioneer physician of CrynssenCounty, and to this sage he was fleeing. As he drove he mocked furiouslyhis melodramatic Race with Death, and he came wearily into thedust-whirling Main Street. Dr. Winter’s office was above a grocery, in along “block” of bright red brick stores with an Egyptian cornice--oftin. The darkness of the broad hallway was soothing after the prairieheat and incandescence. Martin had to wait till three respectfulpatients had been received by Dr. Winter, a hoary man with a sympatheticbass voice, before he was admitted to the consultation-room.
The examining-chair was of doubtful superiority to that once used by DocVickerson of Elk Mills, and sterilizing was apparently done in awash-bowl, but in a corner was an electric therapeutic cabinet with moreelectrodes and pads than Martin had ever seen.
He told the story of the Novaks, and Winter cried, “Why, Doctor, you dideverything you could have and more too. Only thing is, next time, in acrucial case, you better call some older doctor in consultation--notthat you need his advice, but it makes a hit with the family, it dividesthe responsibility, and keeps ’em from going around criticizing. I, uh,I frequently have the honor of being called by some of my youngercolleagues. Just wait. I’ll ’phone the editor of the _Gazette_ and givehim an item about the case.”
When he had telephoned, Dr. Winter shook hands ardently. He indicatedhis 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’tanything the matter with ’em, but say, it would surprise you how itimpresses 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 serviceto you in a consultation-- I only charge a very little more than myregular fee, and it looks so well, talking the case over with an olderman.”
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 thatsnuffling 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 foranother discussion of her non-existent ailments, and two days laterHenry Novak appeared, saying proudly:
“Well, Doc, we all done what we could for the poor little girl, but Iguess I waited too long calling you. The woman is awful’ cut up. She andI was reading that piece in the _Eagle_ about it. We showed it to thepriest. Say, Doc, I wish you’d take a look at my foot. I got kind of arheumatic pain in the ankle.”
CHAPTER XVI
I
When he had practised medicine in Wheatsylvania for one year, Martin wasan inconspicuous but not discouraged country doctor. In summer Leora andhe drove to the Pony River for picnic suppers and a swim, very noisy,splashing, and immodest; through autumn he went duck-hunting with BertTozer, who became nearly tolerable when he stood at sunset on a passbetween two slews; and with winter isolating the village in a sun-blankdesert of snow, they had sleigh-rides, card-parties, “sociables” at thechurches.
When Martin’s flock turned to him for help, their need and their patientobedience made them beautiful. Once or twice he lost his temper withjovial villagers who bountifully explained to him that he was less agedthan he might have been; once or twice he drank too much whisky at pokerparties in the back room of the Coöperative Store; but he was known asreliable, skilful, and honest--and on the whole he was rather lessdistinguished than Alec Ingleblad the barber, less prosperous than NilsKrag, the carpenter, and less interesting to his neighbors than theFinnish garageman.
Then one accident and one mistake made him famous for full twelve milesabout.
He had gone fishing, in the spring. As he passed a farmhouse a woman ranout shrieking that her baby had swallowed a thimble and was choking todeath. Martin had for surgical kit a large jack-knife. He sharpened iton the farmer’s oilstone, sterilized it in the tea-kettle, operated onthe baby’s throat, and saved its life.
Every newspaper in the Pony River Valley had a paragraph, and beforethis sensation was over he cured Miss Agnes Ingleblad of her desire tobe cured.
She had achieved cold hands and a slow circulation, and he was called atmidnight. He was soggily sleepy, after two country drives on muddyroads, and in his torpor he gave her an overdose of strychnin, which soshocked and stimulated her that she decided to be well. It was soviolent a change that it made her more interesting than being aninvalid--people had of late taken remarkably small pleasure in hersymptoms. She went about praising Martin, and all the world said, “Ihear this Doc Arrowsmith is the only fellow Agnes ever doctored withthat’s done her a mite of good.”
He gathered a practise small, sound, and in no way remarkable. Leora andhe moved from the Tozers’ to a cottage of their own, with aparlor-dining-room which displayed a nickeled stove on bright, new,pleasant-smelling linoleum, and a goldenoak sideboard with a souvenirmatch-holder from Lake Minnetonka. He bought a small Roentgen rayoutfit; and he was made a director of the Tozer bank. He became too busyto 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 onthe road and be a hobo, but I never expected to be a Pillar of theCommunity. 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 meto play the organ and smile at the cute jokes you make about Willy’s notlearning 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 hadlived in Wheatsylvania for a year and a half, Bert Tozer became aProminent Booster. He returned from the state convention of the ModernWoodmen of America with notions. Several towns had sent boostingdelegations to the convention, and the village of Groningen had turnedout 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 aWheatsylvania pennant. He had bought thirty of them, and they were onsale at the bank at seventy-five cents apiece. This, Bert explained toevery one who came into the bank, was exactly cost-price, which waswithin eleven cents of the truth. He came galloping at Martin, demandingthat he be the first to display a pennant.
“I don’t want one of those fool things flopping from my ’bus,” protestedMartin. “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 strangersbelieve Wheatsylvania is a metropolis like New York or Jimtown byhanging a dusty rag behind a second-hand tin lizzie?”
“You never did have any patriotism! Let me tell you, Mart, if you don’tput 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, orat least to several square miles of the world, that Wheatsylvania wasthe “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 somepublic spirit and appreciate the place he gets his money outa,” thecitizenry nodded and spat, and began to question Martin’s fame as aworker of miracles.
III
He had intimates--the barber, the editor of the _Eagle_, thegarageman--to whom he talked comfortably of hunting and the crops, andwith whom he played poker. Perhaps he was too intimate with them. It wasthe theory of Crynssen County that it was quite all right for a youngprofessional man to take a timely drink providing he kept it secret andmade up for it by yearning over the clergy of the neighborhood. But withthe clergy Martin was brief, and his drinking and poker he neverconcealed.
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 wasnot at all because he was a distant and supersensitive young man butbecause he found more savor in the garageman’s salty remarks on the artof remembering to ante in poker.
Through all the state there were celebrated poker players,rustic-looking men with stolid faces, men who sat in shirt-sleeves,chewing tobacco; men whose longest remark was “By me,” and who delightedto plunder the gilded and condescending traveling salesmen. When therewas news of a “big game on,” the county sports dropped in silently andwent to work--the sewing-machine agent from Leopolis, the undertakerfrom Vanderheide’s Grove, the bootlegger from St. Luke, the red fat manfrom Melody who had no known profession.
Once (still do men tell of it gratefully, up and down the Valley), theyplayed for seventy-two unbroken hours, in the office of theWheatsylvania garage. It had been a livery-stable; it was littered withrobes and long whips, and the smell of horses mingled with the reek ofgasoline.
The players came and went, and sometimes they slept on the floor for anhour or two, but they were never less than four in the game. The stinkof cheap feeble cigarettes and cheap powerful cigars hovered about thetable like a malign spirit; the floor was scattered with stubs, matches,old cards, and whisky bottles. Among the warriors were Martin, AlecIngleblad the barber, and a highway engineer, all of them stripped toflannel 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 ofWheatsylvania, and to every one he gossiped about Martin’s evil ways andhis own patience. Thus it happened that while Martin was at the heightof his prosperity and credit as a physician, along the Pony River Valleysinuated the whispers that he was a gambler, that he was a “drinkingman,” 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-meantgreetings: “You ought to leave a little hooch for the rest of us todrink, Doc,” or “I s’pose you’re too busy playing poker to drive out tothe house and take a look at the woman.” He was guilty of an absurd andboyish tactlessness when he heard Norblom observing to the postmaster,“A fellow that calls himself a doctor just because he had luck with thatfool Agnes Ingleblad, he hadn’t ought to go getting drunk anddisgracing--”
Martin stopped. “Norblom! You talking about me?”
The storekeeper turned slowly. “I got more important things to do ’ntalk about you,” he cackled.
As Martin went on he heard laughter.
He told himself that these villagers were generous; that their snoopingwas in part an affectionate interest, and inevitable in a village wherethe most absorbing event of the year was the United Brethren SundaySchool picnic on Fourth of July. But he could not rid himself of twitchydiscomfort at their unending and maddeningly detailed comments oneverything. He felt as though the lightest word he said in hisconsultation-room would be megaphoned from flapping ear to ear all downthe country roads.
He was contented enough in gossiping about fishing with the barber, norwas he condescending to meteorologicomania, but except for Leora he hadno 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 hewas an acrid debater. Martin saw that, unless he struggled, not onlywould 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 themost honest practitioner in the Valley. On impulse Martin drove down tocall on him.
Dr. Hesselink was a man of forty, ruddy, tall, broad-shouldered. Youknew immediately that he was careful and that he was afraid of nothing,however much he might lack in imagination. He received Martin with novast ebullience, and his stare said, “Well, what do you want? I’m a busyman.”
“Doctor,” Martin chattered, “do you find it hard to keep up with medicaldevelopments?”
“No. Read the medical journals.”
“Well, don’t you--gosh, I don’t want to get sentimental about it, butdon’t you find that without contact with the Big Guns you get mentallylazy--sort of lacking in inspiration?”
“I do not! There’s enough inspiration for me in trying to help thesick.”
To himself Martin was protesting, “All right, if you don’t want to befriendly, go to the devil!” But he tried again:
“I know. But for the game of the thing, for the pleasure of increasingmedical knowledge, how can you keep up if you don’t have anything butroutine practise among a lot of farmers?”
“Arrowsmith, I may do you an injustice, but there’s a lot of you youngpractitioners who feel superior to the farmers, that are doing their ownjobs better than you are. You think that if you were only in the citywith libraries and medical meetings and everything, you’d develop.Well, I don’t know of anything to prevent your studying at home! Youconsider yourself so much better educated than these rustics, but Inotice you say ‘gosh’ and ‘Big Guns’ and that sort of thing. How much doyou read? Personally, I’m extremely well satisfied. My people pay me anexcellent living wage, they appreciate my work, and they honor me byelection to the schoolboard. I find that a good many of these farmersthink 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 atHesselink’s superiority about not feeling superior, but he stumbled intouncomfortable meditation. It was true; he was half-educated. He wassupposed to be a college graduate but he knew nothing of economics,nothing of history, nothing of music or painting. Except in hastybolting for examinations he had read no poetry save that of RobertService, and the only prose besides medical journalism at which helooked nowadays was the baseball and murder news in the Minneapolispapers and Wild West stories in the magazines.
He reviewed the “intelligent conversation” which, in the desert ofWheatsylvania, he believed himself to have conducted at Mohalis. Heremembered that to Clif Clawson it had been pretentious to use anyphrase which was not as colloquial and as smutty as the speech of atruck-driver, and that his own discourse had differed from Clif’slargely in that it had been less fantastic and less original. He couldrecall nothing save the philosophy of Max Gottlieb, occasional scoldingsof Angus Duer, one out of ten among Madeline Fox’s digressions, and thecouncils of Dad Silva which was above the level of Alec Ingleblad’sbarber-shop.
He came home hating Hesselink but by no means loving himself; he fellupon Leora and, to her placid agreement, announced that they were “goingto get educated, if it kills us.” He went at it as he had gone atbacteriology.
He read European history aloud at Leora, who looked interested or atleast forgiving; he worried the sentences in a copy of “The Golden Bowl”which an unfortunate school-teacher had left at the Tozers’; he borroweda volume of Conrad from the village editor and afterward, as he drovethe prairie roads, he was marching into jungle villages--sun helmets,orchids, lost temples of obscene and dog-faced deities, secret andsun-scarred rivers. He was conscious of his own mean vocabulary. Itcannot be said that he became immediately and conspicuously articulate,yet it is possible that in those long intense evenings of reading withLeora he advanced a step or two toward the tragic enchantments of MaxGottlieb’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 andeccentric, and neither toiled in laboratories nor had a decent officeand a home and a lacy wife. He roamed the world fighting epidemics andfounding institutions and making inconvenient speeches and trying newdrinks. He was a Swede by birth, a German by education, a little ofeverything by speech, and his clubs were in London, Paris, Washington,and New York. He had been heard of from Batoum and Fuchau, from Milanand Bechuanaland, from Antofa*gasta and Cape Romanzoff. Manson onTropical Diseases mentions Sondelius’s admirable method of killing ratswith hydrocyanic acid gas, and _The Sketch_ once mentioned his atrocioussystem in baccarat.
Gustaf Sondelius shouted, in high places and low, that most diseasescould be and must be wiped out; that tuberculosis, cancer, typhoid, theplague, influenza, were an invading army against which the world mustmobilize--literally; that public health authorities must supersedegenerals and oil kings. He was lecturing through America, and hisexclamatory assertions were syndicated in the press.
Martin sniffed at most newspaper articles touching on science or healthbut Sondelius’s violence caught him, and suddenly he was converted, andit was an important thing for him, that conversion.
He told himself that however much he might relieve the sick, essentiallyhe was a business man, in rivalry with Dr. Winter of Leopolis and Dr.Hesselink of Groningen; that though they might be honest, honesty andhealing were less their purpose than making money; that to get rid ofavoidable disease and produce a healthy population would be the worstthing in the world for them; and that they must all be replaced bypublic health officials.
Like all ardent agnostics, Martin was a religious man. Since the deathof his Gottlieb-cult he had unconsciously sought a new passion, and hefound it now in Gustaf Sondelius’s war on disease. Immediately he becameas 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 muchtuberculosis.
This was infuriating, because none of their rights as American citizenswas better established, or more often used, than the privilege of beingill. 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 ourhouses--said we were committing a crime if we had the con. here! Won’tstand for nobody talking to me like that!”
Everything became clear to Martin--too clear. The nation must make thebest physicians autocratic officials, at once, and that was all therewas 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 suggestionsbut only a beautiful faith. At breakfast he scolded, “Another idioticday of writing prescriptions for bellyaches that ought never to havehappened! If I could only get into the Big Fight, along with men likeSondelius! It makes me tired!”
Leora murmured, “Yes, darling. I’ll promise to be good. I won’t have anylittle 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 everythinghe had missed.
“He’s going to have a real education!” he gloated, as they sat on theporch in spring twilight. “He’ll learn all this literature and stuff. Wehaven’t done much ourselves--here we are, stuck in this two-by-twicecrossroads for the rest of our lives--but maybe we’ve gone a littlebeyond our dads, and he’ll go way beyond us.”
He was worried, for all his flamboyance. Leora had undue morningsickness. Till noon she dragged about the house, pea-green and tousledand hollow-faced. He found a sort of maid, and came home to help, towipe 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 thegrubby second-hand couch on which she lay in her weakness; he held herhand and crowed:
“Golly, we-- No, not ‘golly’. Well, what _can_ you say except ‘golly’?Anyway: Someday we’ll save up enough money for a couple months in Italyand 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, darnhim!... And he’ll learn to chatter Wop and French and everything like aregular native, and his dad and mother’ll be so proud! Oh, we’ll be afierce 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 thedoorstep and smoke pipes and snicker at all the respectable people goingby, and tell each other scandalous stories about ’em till they want totake a shot at us, and our boy--he’ll wear a plug hat and have achauffeur--he won’t dare to recognize us!”
Trained now to the false cheerfulness of the doctor, he shouted, whenshe was racked and ghastly with the indignity of morning sickness,“There, that’s fine, old girl! Wouldn’t be making a good baby if youweren’t sick. Everybody is.” He was lying, and he was nervous. Wheneverhe thought of her dying, he seemed to die with her. Barren of hercompanionship, 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 itto her, if she was not there--
He denounced Nature for her way of tricking human beings, by every gaydevice of moonlight and white limbs and reaching loneliness, into havingbabies, 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 hiseyes had opened to the terrible beauty of pain, but he must not go farfrom Leora’s need.
Her morning sickness turned into pernicious vomiting. Suddenly, whileshe was torn and inhuman with agony, he sent for Dr. Hesselink, and thathorrible afternoon when the prairie spring was exuberant outside thewindows 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 madepeople entrust their lives to him. Not cold and blaming was Hesselinknow, but an older and wiser brother, very compassionate. Martin sawnothing. He was not a physician. He was a terrified boy, less useful toHesselink 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 babynow, and so I want-- Oh, I’m no good! And I’ve got a rotten temper. Butto 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.” Shetried to laugh. “Perhaps I wanted him because I could boss him. I’venever had anybody that would let me boss him. So if I can’t have a realbaby, I’ll have to bring you up. Make you a great man that everybodywill wonder at, like your Sondelius.... Darling, I worried so about yourworrying--”
He kissed her, and for hours they sat together, unspeaking, eternallyunderstanding, in the prairie twilight.
