Thewaiters at Nokomis Lodge, among the Ontario pines, were all of them university students. They were not supposed to appear at the Lodge dances—they merely appeared, and took the prettiest girls away from the elderly and denunciatory suitors in white flannels. They had to work but seven hours a day. The rest of the time they fished, swam, and tramped the shadowy trails, and Martin came back to Mohalis placid—and enormously in love with Madeline.
They had written to each other, politely, regretfully, and once a fortnight; then passionately and daily. For the summer she had been dragged to her home town, near the Ohio border of Winnemac, a town larger than Martin’s native Elk Mills but more sun-baked, more barren with little factories. She sighed, in a huge loose script dashing all over the page:
Perhaps we shall never see each other again but I do want you to know how much I prize all the talks we had together about science & ideals & education, etc.— I certainly appreciate them here when I listen to these stick in the muds going on, oh, it is too dreadful, about their automobiles & how much they have to pay their maids and so on & so forth. You gave me so much but I did give you something didn’t I? I can’t always be in the wrong can I?
Perhaps we shall never see each other again but I do want you to know how much I prize all the talks we had together about science & ideals & education, etc.— I certainly appreciate them here when I listen to these stick in the muds going on, oh, it is too dreadful, about their automobiles & how much they have to pay their maids and so on & so forth. You gave me so much but I did give you something didn’t I? I can’t always be in the wrong can I?
“My dear, my little girl!” he lamented. “‘Can’t always be in the wrong’! You poor kid, you poor dear kid!”
By midsummer they were firmly re-engaged and, though he was slightly disturbed by the cashier, a young and giggling Wisconsin school-teacher with ankles, he so longed for Madeline that he lay awake thinking of giving up his job and fleeing to her caresses—lay awake for minutes at a time.
The returning train was torturingly slow, and he dismounted at Mohalis fevered with visions of her. Twenty minutes after, they were clinging together in the quiet of her living-room. It is true that twenty minutes after that, she was sneering at Clif Clawson, at fishing, and at all school-teachers, but to his fury she yielded in tears.
His Junior year was a whirlwind. To attend lectures on physical diagnosis, surgery, neurology, obstetrics, and gynecology in the morning, with hospital demonstrations in the afternoon; to supervise the making of media and the sterilization of glassware for Gottlieb; to instruct a new class in the use of microscope and filter and autoclave; to read a page now and then of scientific German or French; to see Madeline constantly; to get through it all he drove himself to hysterical hurrying, and in the dizziest of it he began his first original research—his first lyric, his first ascent of unexplored mountains.
He had immunized rabbits to typhoid, and he believed that if he mixed serum taken from these immune animals with typhoid germs, the germs would die. Unfortunately—he felt—the germs grew joyfully. He was troubled; he was sure that his technique had been clumsy; he performed his experiment over and over, working till midnight, waking at dawn to ponder on his notes. (Though in letters to Madeline his writing was an inconsistent scrawl, in his laboratory notes it was precise.) When he was quite sure that Nature was persisting in doing something she ought not to, he went guiltily to Gottlieb, protesting, “The darn’ bugs ought to die in this immune serum, but they don’t. There’s something wrong with the theories.”
“Young man, do you set yourself up against science?” grated Gottlieb, flapping the papers on his desk. “Do you feel competent, huh, to attack the dogmas of immunology?”
“I’m sorry, sir. I can’t help what the dogma is. Here’s my protocols. Honestly, I’ve gone over and over the stuff, and I get the same results, as you can see. I only know what I observe.”
Gottlieb beamed. “I give you, my boy, my episcopal blessings! That is the way! Observe what you observe, and if it does violence to all the nice correct views of science—out they go! I am very pleast, Martin. But now find out the Why, the underneath principle.”
Ordinarily, Gottlieb called him “Arrowsmith” or “You” or “Uh.” When he was furious he called him, or any other student, “Doctor.” It was only in high moments that he honored him with “Martin,” and the boy trotted off blissfully, to try to find (but never to succeed in finding) the Why that made everything so.
Gottlieb had sent him into Zenith, to the huge Zenith General Hospital, to secure a strain of meningococcus from an interesting patient. The bored reception clerk—who was interested only in obtaining the names, business addresses, and religions of patients, and did not care who died or who spat on the beautiful blue and white linoleum or who went about collecting meningococci, so long as the addresses were properly entered—loftily told him to go up to Ward D. Through the long hallways, past numberless rooms from which peered yellow-faced old women sitting up in bed in linty nightgowns, Martin wandered, trying to look important, hoping to be taken for a doctor, and succeeding only in feeling extraordinarily embarrassed.
He passed several nurses rapidly, half nodding to them, in the manner (or what he conceived to be the manner) of a brilliant young surgeon who is about to operate. He was so absorbed in looking like a brilliant young surgeon that he was completely lost, and discovered himself in a wing filled with private suites. He was late. He had no more time to go on being impressive. Like all males, he hated to confess ignorance by asking directions, but grudgingly he stopped at the door of a bedroom in which a probationer nurse was scrubbing the floor.
She was a smallish and slender probationer, muffled in a harsh blue denim dress, an enormous white apron, and a turban bound about her head with an elastic—a uniform as grubby as her pail of scrub-water. She peered up with the alert impudence of a squirrel.
“Nurse,” he said, “I want to find Ward D.”
Lazily, “Do you?”
“I do! If I can interrupt your work—”
“Doesn’t matter. The damn’ superintendent of nurses put me at scrubbing, and we aren’t eversupposedto scrub floors, because she caught me smoking a cigarette. She’s an old terror. If she found a child like you wandering around here, she’d drag you out by the ear.”
“Mydearyoung woman, it may interest you to know—”
“Oh! ‘My dear young woman, it may—’ Sounds exactly like our old prof, back home.”
Her indolent amusement, her manner of treating him asthough they were a pair of children making tongues at each other in a railroad station, was infuriating to the earnest young assistant of Professor Gottlieb.
“I am Dr. Arrowsmith,” he snorted, “and I’ve been informed that even probationers learn that the first duty of a nurse is to stand when addressing doctors! I wish to find Ward D, to take a strain of—it may interest you to know!—a very dangerous microbe, and if you will kindly direct me—”
“Oh, gee, I’ve been getting fresh again. I don’t seem to get along with this military discipline. All right. I’ll stand up.” She did. Her every movement was swiftly smooth as the running of a cat. “You go back, turn right, then left. I’m sorry I was fresh. But if you saw some of the old muffs of doctors that a nurse has to be meek to— Honestly, Doctor—if youarea doctor—”
“I don’t see that I need to convince you!” he raged, as he stalked off. All the way to Ward D he was furious at her veiled derision. He was an eminent scientist, and it was outrageous that he should have to endure impudence from a probationer—a singularly vulgar probationer, a thin and slangy young woman apparently from the West. He repeated his rebuke: “I don’t see that I need to convince you.” He was proud of himself for having been lofty. He pictured himself telling Madeline about it, concluding, “I just said to her quietly, ‘My dear young woman, I don’t know that you are the person to whom I have to explain my mission here,’ I said, and she wilted.”
But her image had not wilted, when he had found the intern who was to help him and had taken the spinal fluid. She was before him, provocative, enduring. He had to see her again, and convince her—“Take a better man than she is, better man than I’ve ever met, to get away with being insulting tome!” said the modest young scientist.
He had raced back to her room and they were staring at each other before it came to him that he had not worked out the crushing things he was going to say. She had risen from her scrubbing. She had taken off her turban, and her hair was silky and honey-colored, her eyes were blue, her face childish. There was nothing of the slavey in her. He could imagine her running down hillsides, shinning up a stack of straw.
“Oh,” she said gravely. “I didn’t mean to be rude then.I was just— Scrubbing makes me bad-tempered. I thought you were awfully nice, and I’m sorry I hurt your feelings, but you did seem so young for a doctor.”
“I’m not. I’m a medic. I was showing off.”
“So was I!”
He felt an instant and complete comradeship with her, a relation free from the fencing and posing of his struggle with Madeline. He knew that this girl was of his own people. If she was vulgar, jocular, unreticent, she was also gallant, she was full of laughter at humbugs, she was capable of a loyalty too casual and natural to seem heroic. His voice was lively, though his words were only:
“Pretty hard, this training for nursing, I guess.”
“Not so awful, but it’s just as romantic as being a hired girl—that’s what we call ’em in Dakota.”
“Come from Dakota?”
“I come from the most enterprising town—three hundred and sixty-two inhabitants—in the entire state of North Dakota— Wheatsylvania. Are you in the U. medic school?”
To a passing nurse, the two youngsters would have seemed absorbed in hospital business. Martin stood at the door, she by her scrubbing pail. She had reassumed her turban; its bagginess obscured her bright hair.
“Yes, I’m a Junior medic in Mohalis. But— I don’t know. I’m not much of a medic. I like the lab side. I think I’ll be a bacteriologist, and raise Cain with some of the fool theories of immunology. And I don’t think much of the bedside manner.”
“I’m glad you don’t. You get it here. You ought to hear some of the docs that are the sweetest old pussies with their patients—the way they bawl out the nurses. But labs—they seem sort of real. I don’t suppose you can bluff a bacteria—what is it?—bacterium?”
“No, they’re— What do they call you?”
“Me? Oh, it’s an idiotic name— Leora Tozer.”
“What’s the matter with Leora? It’s fine.”
Sound of mating birds, sound of spring blossoms dropping in the tranquil air, the bark of sleepy dogs at midnight; who is to set them down and make them anything but hackneyed? And as natural, as conventional, as youthfully gauche, as eternally beautiful and authentic as those ancient sounds was the talk of Martin and Leora in that passionate half-hourwhen each found in the other a part of his own self, always vaguely missed, discovered now with astonished joy. They rattled like hero and heroine of a sticky tale, like sweat-shop operatives, like bouncing rustics, like prince and princess. Their words were silly and inconsequential, heard one by one, yet taken together they were as wise and important as the tides or the sounding wind.
He told her that he admired Max Gottlieb, that he had crossed her North Dakota on a train, and that he was an excellent hockey-player. She told him that she “adored” vaudeville, that her father, Andrew Jackson Tozer, was born in the East (by which she meant Illinois), and that she didn’t particularly care for nursing. She had no especial personal ambition; she had come here because she liked adventure. She hinted, with debonair regret, that she was not too popular with the superintendent of nurses; she meant to be good but somehow she was always dragged into rebellions connected with midnight fudge or elopements. There was nothing heroic in her story but from her placid way of telling it he had an impression of gay courage.
He interrupted with an urgent, “When can you get away from the hospital for dinner? To-night?”
“Why—”
“Please!”
“All right.”
“When can I call for you?”
“Do you think I ought to— Well, seven.”
All the way back to Mohalis he alternately raged and rejoiced. He informed himself that he was a moron to make this long trip into Zenith twice in one day; he remembered that he was engaged to a girl called Madeline Fox; he worried the matter of unfaithfulness; he asserted that Leora Tozer was merely an imitation nurse who was as illiterate as a kitchen wench and as impertinent as a newsboy; he decided, several times he decided, to telephone her and free himself from the engagement.
He was at the hospital at a quarter to seven.
He had to wait for twenty minutes in a reception-room like that of an undertaker. He was in a panic. What was he doing here? She’d probably be agonizingly dull, through a whole long dinner. Would he even recognize her, in mufti? Then he leaped up. She was at the door. Her sulky blueuniform was gone; she was childishly slim and light in a princess frock that was a straight line from high collar and soft young breast to her feet. It seemed natural to tuck her hand under his arm as they left the hospital. She moved beside him with a little dancing step, shyer now than she had been in the dignity of her job but looking up at him with confidence.
“Glad I came?” he demanded.
She thought it over. She had a trick of gravely thinking over obvious questions; and gravely (but with the gravity of a child, not the ponderous gravity of a politician or an office-manager) she admitted, “Yes, I am glad. I was afraid you’d go and get sore at me because I was so fresh, and I wanted to apologize and— I liked your being so crazy about your bacteriology. I think I’m a little crazy, too. The interns here—they come bothering around a lot, but they’re so sort of—so sort ofsoggy, with their new stethoscopes and their brand-new dignity. Oh—” Most gravely of all: “Oh, gee, yes, I’m glad you came.... Am I an idiot to admit it?”
“You’re a darling to admit it.” He was a little dizzy with her. He pressed her hand with his arm.
“You won’t think I let every medic and doctor pick me up, will you?”
“Leora! And you don’t think I try and pick up every pretty girl I meet? I liked— I felt somehow we two could be chums. Can’t we? Can’t we?”
“I don’t know. We’ll see. Where are we going for dinner?”
“The Grand Hotel.”
“We are not! It’s terribly expensive. Unless you’re awfully rich. You aren’t, are you?”
“No, I’m not. Just enough money to get through medic school. But I want—”
“Let’s go to the Bijou. It’s a nice place, and it isn’t expensive.”
He remembered how often Madeline Fox had hinted that it would be a tasty thing to go to the Grand, Zenith’s most resplendent hotel, but that was the last time he thought of Madeline that evening. He was absorbed in Leora. He found in her a casualness, a lack of prejudice, a directness, surprising in the daughter of Andrew Jackson Tozer. She was feminine but undemanding; she was never Improving and rarely shocked; she was neither flirtatious nor cold. She was indeed the first girl to whom he had ever talked without self-consciousness. It is doubtful if Leora herself had a chance to say anything, for he poured out his every confidence as a disciple of Gottlieb. To Madeline, Gottlieb was a wicked old man who made fun of the sanctities of Marriage and Easter lilies, to Clif, he was a bore, but Leora glowed as Martin banged the table and quoted his idol: “Up to the present, even in the work of Ehrlich, most research has been largely a matter of trial and error, the empirical method, which is the opposite of the scientific method, by which one seeks to establish a general law governing a group of phenomena so that he may predict what will happen.”
He intoned it reverently, staring across the table at her, almost glaring at her. He insisted, “Do you see where he leaves all these detail-grubbing, machine-made researchers buzzing in the manure heap just as much as he does the commercial docs? Do you get him? Do you?”
“Yes, I think I do. Anyway, I get your enthusiasm for him. But please don’t bully me so!”
“Was I bullying? I didn’t mean to. Only, when I get to thinking about the way most of these damned profs don’t even know what he’s up to—”
Martin was off again, and if Leora did not altogether understand the relation of the synthesis of antibodies to the work of Arrhenius, yet she listened with comfortable pleasure in his zeal, with none of Madeline Fox’s gently corrective admonitions.
She had to warn him that she must be at the hospital by ten.
“I’ve talked too much! Lord, I hope I haven’t bored you,” he blurted.
“I loved it.”
“And I was so technical, and so noisy— Oh, Iama chump!”
“I like having you trust me. I’m not ‘earnest,’ and I haven’t any brains whatever, but I do love it when my menfolks think I’m intelligent enough to hear what they really think and— Good night!”
They dined together twice in two weeks, and only twice in that time, though she telephoned to him, did Martin see his honest affianced, Madeline.
He came to know all of Leora’s background. Her bedridden grand-aunt in Zenith, who was her excuse for coming so far to take hospital training. The hamlet of Wheatsylvania, North Dakota; one street of shanties with the red grain-elevators at the end. Her father, Andrew Jackson Tozer, sometimes known as Jackass Tozer; owner of the bank, of the creamery, and an elevator, therefore the chief person in town; pious at Wednesday evening prayer-meeting, fussing over every penny he gave to Leora or her mother. Bert Tozer, her brother; squirrel teeth, a gold eye-glass chain over his ear, cashier and all the rest of the staff in the one-room bank owned by his father. The chicken salad and coffee suppers at the United Brethren Church; German Lutheran farmers singing ancient Teutonic hymns; the Hollanders, the Bohemians and Poles. And round about the village, the living wheat, arched above by tremendous clouds. He saw Leora, always an “odd child,” doing obediently enough the flat household tasks but keeping snug the belief that some day she would find a youngster with whom, in whatever danger or poverty, she would behold all the colored world.
It was at the end of her hesitating effort to make him see her childhood that he cried, “Darling, you don’t have to tell me about you. I’ve always known you. I’m not going to let you go, no matter what. You’re going to marry me—”
They said it with clasping hands, confessing eyes, in that blatant restaurant. Her first words were:
“I want to call you ‘Sandy.’ Why do I? I don’t know why. You’re as unsandy as can be, but somehow ‘Sandy’ means you to me and— Oh, my dear, I do like you!”
Martin went home engaged to two girls at once.
He had promised to see Madeline the next morning.
By any canon of respectable behavior he should have felt like a low dog; he assured himself that he must feel like a low dog; but he could not bring it off. He thought of Madeline’s pathetic enthusiasms: her “Provençal pleasaunce” and the limp-leather volumes of poetry which she patted with fond finger-tips; of the tie she had bought for him, and her pride in his hair when he brushed it like the patent-leather heroes in magazine illustrations. He mourned that he had sinned against loyalty. But his agitation broke against the solidity of his union with Leora. Her companionship released his soul. Even when, as advocate for Madeline, he pleadedthat Leora was a trivial young woman who probably chewed gum in private and certainly was careless about her nails in public, her commonness was dear to the commonness that was in himself, valid as ambition or reverence, an earthy base to her gaiety as it was to his nervous scientific curiosity.
He was absent-minded in the laboratory, that fatal next day. Gottlieb had twice to ask him whether he had prepared the new batch of medium, and Gottlieb was an autocrat, sterner with his favorites than with the ruck of students. He snarled, “Arrowsmith, you are a moon-calf! My God, am I to spend my life withDummköpfe? I cannot be always alone, Martin! Are you going to fail me? Two, three days now you haf not been keen about work.”
Martin went off mumbling, “I love that man!” In his tangled mood he catalogued Madeline’s pretenses, her nagging, her selfishness, her fundamental ignorance. He worked himself up to a state of virtue in which it was agreeably clear to him that he must throw Madeline over, entirely as a rebuke. He went to her in the evening prepared to blaze out at her first complaining, to forgive her finally, but to break their engagement and make life resolutely simple again.
She did not complain.
She ran to him. “Dear, you’re so tired—your eyes look tired. Have you been working frightfully hard? I’ve been so sorry you couldn’t come ’round, this week. Dear, you mustn’t kill yourself. Think of all the years you have ahead to do splendid things in. No, don’t talk. I want you to rest. Mother’s gone to the movies. Sit here. See, I’ll make you so comfy with these pillows. Just lean back—go to sleep if you want to—and I’ll read you ‘The Crock of Gold.’ You’ll love it.”
He was determined that he would not love it and, as he probably had no sense of humor whatever, it is doubtful whether he appreciated it, but its differentness aroused him. Though Madeline’s voice was shrill and cornfieldish after Leora’s lazy softness, she read so eagerly that he was sick ashamed of his intention to hurt her. He saw that it was she, with her pretenses, who was the child, and the detached and fearless Leora who was mature, mistress of a real world. The reproofs with which he had planned to crush her vanished.
Suddenly she was beside him, begging, “I’ve been so lonely for you, all week!”
So he was a traitor to both women. It was Leora who had intolerably roused him; it was really Leora whom he was caressing now; but it was Madeline who took his hunger to herself, and when she whimpered, “I’m so glad you’re glad to be here,” he could say nothing. He wanted to talk about Leora, to shout about Leora, to exult in her, his woman. He dragged out a few sound but unimpassioned flatteries; he observed that Madeline was a handsome young woman and a sound English scholar; and while she gaped with disappointment at his lukewarmness, he got himself away, at ten. He had finally succeeded very well indeed in feeling like a low dog.
He hastened to Clif Clawson.
He had told Clif nothing about Leora. He resented Clif’s probable scoffing. He thought well of himself for the calmness with which he came into their room. Clif was sitting on the small of his back, shoeless feet upon the study table, reading a Sherlock Holmes story which rested on the powerful volume of Osler’s Medicine which he considered himself to be reading.
“Clif! Want a drink. Tired. Let’s sneak down to Barney’s and see if we can rustle one.”
“Thou speakest as one having tongues and who putteth the speed behind the ole rhombencephalon comprising the cerebellum and the medulla oblongata.”
“Oh, cut out the cuteness! I’m in a bad temper.”
“Ah, the laddy has been having a scrap with his chaste lil Madeline! Was she horrid to ickly Martykins? All right. I’ll quit. Come on. Yoicks for the drink.”
He told three new stories about Professor Robertshaw, all of them scurrilous and most of them untrue, on their way, and he almost coaxed Martin into cheerfulness. “Barney’s” was a pool-room, a tobacco shop and, since Mohalis was dry by local option, an admirable blind-pig. Clif and the hairy-handed Barney greeted each other in a high and worthy manner:
“The benisons of eventide to you, Barney. May your circulation proceed unchecked and particularly the dorsal carpal branch of the ulnar artery, in which connection, comrade, Prof. Dr. Col. Egbert Arrowsmith and I would fain trifle with another bottle of that renowned strawberry pop.”
“Gosh, Clif, you cer’nly got a swell line of jaw-music. IfI ever need a’ arm amputated when you get to be a doc, I’ll come around and let you talk it off. Strawberry pop, gents?”
The front room of Barney’s was an impressionistic painting in which a pool-table, piles of cigarettes, chocolate bars, playing cards, and pink sporting papers were jumbled in chaos. The back room was simpler: cases of sweet and thinly flavored soda, a large ice-box, and two small tables with broken chairs. Barney poured, from a bottle plainly marked Ginger Ale, two glasses of powerful and appallingly raw whisky, and Clif and Martin took them to the table in the corner. The effect was swift. Martin’s confused sorrows turned to optimism. He told Clif that he was going to write a book exposing idealism, but what he meant was that he was going to do something clever about his dual engagement. He had it! He would invite Leora and Madeline to lunch together, tell them the truth, and see which of them loved him. He whooped, and had another whisky; he told Clif that he was a fine fellow, and Barney that he was a public benefactor, and unsteadily he retired to the telephone, which was shut off from public hearing in a closet.
At the Zenith General Hospital he got the night superintendent, and the night superintendent was a man frosty and suspicious. “This is no time to be calling up a probationer! Half-past eleven! Who are you, anyway?”
Martin checked the “I’ll damn’ soon tell you who I am!” which was his natural reaction, and explained that he was speaking for Leora’s invalid grand-aunt, that the poor old lady was very low, and if the night superintendent cared to take upon himself the murder of a blameless gentlewoman—
When Leora came to the telephone he said quickly, and soberly now, feeling as though he had come from the menace of thronging strangers into the security of her presence:
“Leora? Sandy. Meet me Grand lobby to-morrow, twelve-thirty. Must! Important! Fix ’t somehow—your aunt’s sick.”
“All right, dear. G’ night,” was all she said.
It took him long minutes to get an answer from Madeline’s flat, then Mrs. Fox’s voice sounded, sleepily, quaveringly:
“Yes, yes?”
“’S Martin.”
“Who is it Who is it? What is it? Are you calling the Fox apartment?”
“Yes, yes! Mrs. Fox, it’s Martin Arrowsmith speaking.”
“Oh, oh, my dear! The ’phone woke me out of a sound sleep, and I couldn’t make out what you were saying. I was so frightened. I thought maybe it was a telegram or something. I thought perhaps something had happened to Maddy’s brother. What is it, dear? Oh, I do hope nothing’s happened!”
Her confidence in him, the affection of this uprooted old woman bewildered in a strange land, overcame him; he lost all his whisky-colored feeling that he was a nimble fellow, and in a melancholy way, with all the weight of life again upon him, he sighed that no, nothing had happened, but he’d forgotten to tell Madeline something—so shor—so sorry call so late—could he speak Mad just minute—
Then Madeline was bubbling, “Why, Marty dear, what is it? I do hope nothing has happened! Why, dear, you just left here—”
“Listen, d-dear. Forgot to tell you. There’s a—there’s a great friend of mine in Zenith that I want you to meet—”
“Who is he?”
“You’ll see to-morrow. Listen, I want you come in and meet—come meet um at lunch. Going,” with ponderous jocularity, “going to blow you all to a swell feed at the Grand—”
“Oh, how nice!”
“—so I want you to meet me at the eleven-forty interurban, at College Square. Can you?”
Vaguely, “Oh, I’d love to but— I have an eleven o’clock, and I don’t like to cut it, and I promised May Harmon to go shopping with her—she’s looking for some kind of shoes that you can wear with her pink crêpe de chine but that you can walk in—and we sort of thought maybe we might lunch at Ye Kollege Karavanserai—and I’d half planned to go to the movies with her or somebody, Mother says that new Alaska film is simply dandy, she saw it to-night, and I thought I might go see it before they take it off, though Heaven knows I ought to come right home and study and not go anywhere at all—”
“Nowlisten! It’s important. Don’t you trust me? Will you come or not?”
“Why, of course I trust you, dear. All right, I’ll try to be there. The eleven-forty?”
“Yes.”
“At College Square? Or at Bluthman’s Book Shop?”
“At College Square!”
Her gentle “I trust you” and her wambling “I’ll try to” were warring in his ears as he plunged out of the suffocating cell and returned to Clif.
“What’s the grief?” Clif wondered. “Wife passed away? Or did the Giants win in the ninth? Barney, our wandering-boy-to-night looks like a necropsy. Slip him another strawberry pop, quick. Say, Doctor, I think you better call a physician.”
“Oh, shut up,” was all Martin had to say, and that without conviction. Before telephoning he had been full of little brightnesses; he had praised Clif’s pool-playing and called Barney “oldCimex lectularius”; but now, while the affectionate Clif worked on him, he sat brooding save when he grumbled (with a return of self-satisfaction), “If you knew all the troubles I have—all the doggone mess a fellow can get into—you’dfeel down in the mouth!”
Clif was alarmed. “Look here, old socks. If you’ve gotten in debt, I’ll raise the cash, somehow. If it’s— Been going a little too far with Madeline?”
“You make me sick! You’ve got a dirty mind. I’m not worthy to touch Madeline’s hand. I regard her with nothing but respect.”
“The hell you do! But never mind, if you say so. Gosh, wish there wassomethingI could do for you. Oh! Have ’nother shot! Barney! Come a-runnin’!”
By several drinks Martin was warmed into a hazy carelessness, and Clif solicitously dragged him home after he had desired to fight three large academic sophomores. But in the morning he awoke with a crackling skull and a realization that he was going to face Leora and Madeline at lunch.
His half-hour journey with Madeline into Zenith seemed a visible and oppressing thing, like a tornado cloud. He had not merely to get through each minute as it came; the whole grim thirty minutes were present at the same time. While he was practising the tactful observation he was going to present two minutes from now, he could still hear the clumsy thing he had said two minutes before. He fought to keep herattention from the “great friend of his” whom they were to meet. With fatuous beaming he described a night at Barney’s; without any success whatever he tried to be funny; and when Madeline lectured him on the evils of liquor and the evils of association with immoral persons, he was for once relieved. But he could not sidetrack her.
“Who is this man we’re going to see? What are you so mysterious about? Oh, Martykins, is it a joke? Aren’t we going to meet anybody? Did you just want to run away from Mama for a while and we have a bat at the Grand together? Oh, what fun! I’ve always wanted to lunch at the Grand. Of course I do think it’s too sort of rococo, but still, it is impressive, and— Did I guess it, darling?”
“No, there’s some one— Oh, we’re going to meet somebody, all right!”
“Then why don’t you tell me who he is? Honestly, Mart, you make me impatient.”
“Well, I’ll tell you. It isn’t a Him; it’s a Her.”
“Oh!”
“It’s— You know my work takes me to the hospitals, and some of the nurses at Zenith General have been awfully helpful.” He was panting. His eyes ached. Since the torture of the coming lunch was inevitable, he wondered why he should go on trying to resist his punishment. “Especially there’s one nurse there who’s a wonder. She’s learned so much about the care of the sick, and she puts me onto a lot of good stunts, and she seems like a nice girl— Miss Tozer, her name is— I think her first name is Lee or something like that—and she’s so—her father is one of the big men in North Dakota—awfully rich—big banker— I guess she just took up nursing to do her share in the world’s work.” He had achieved Madeline’s own tone of poetic uplift. “I thought you two might like to know each other. You remember you were saying how few girls there are in Mohalis that really appreciate—appreciate ideals.”
“Ye-es.” Madeline gazed at something far away and, whatever it was, she did not like it. “I shall be ver’ pleased to meet her, of course.Anyfriend of yours— Oh, Mart! I do hope you don’t flirt; I hope you don’t get too friendly with all these nurses. I don’t know anything about it, of course, but I keep hearing how some of these nurses are regular manhunters.”
“Well, let me tell you right now, Leora isn’t!”
“No, I’m sure, but— Oh, Martykins, you won’t be silly and let these nurses just amuse themselves with you? I mean, for your own sake. They have such an advantage. Poor Madeline, she wouldn’t be allowed to go hanging around men’s rooms learning—things, and you think you’re so psychological, Mart, but honestly, any smart woman can twist you around her finger.”
“Well, I guess I can take care of myself!”
“Oh, I mean— I don’t mean— But I do hope this Tozer person— I’m sure I shall like her, if you do, but— I am your own true love, aren’t I, always!”
She, the proper, ignored the passengers as she clasped his hand. She sounded so frightened that his anger at her reflections on Leora turned into misery. Incidentally, her thumb was gouging painfully into the back of his hand. He tried to look tender as he protested, “Sure—sure—gosh, honest, Mad, look out. That old duffer across the aisle is staring at us.”
For whatever infidelities he might ever commit he was adequately punished before they had reached the Grand Hotel.
The Grand was, in 1907, the best hotel in Zenith. It was compared by traveling salesmen to the Parker House, the Palmer House, the West Hotel. It has been humbled since by the supercilious modesty of the vast Hotel Thornleigh; dirty now is its tessellated floor and all the wild gilt tarnished, and in its ponderous leather chairs are torn seams and stogie ashes and horse-dealers. But in its day it was the proudest inn between Chicago and Pittsburg; an oriental palace, the entrance a score of brick Moorish arches, the lobby towering from a black and white marble floor, up past gilt iron balconies, to the green, pink, pearl, and amber skylight seven stories above.
They found Leora in the lobby, tiny on an enormous couch built round a pillar. She stared at Madeline, quiet, waiting. Martin perceived that Leora was unusually sloppy—his own word. It did not matter to him how clumsily her honey-colored hair was tucked under her black hat, a characterless little mushroom of a hat, but he did see and resent the contrast between her shirtwaist, with the third button missing, her checked skirt, her unfortunate bright brown bolero jacket, and Madeline’s sleekness of blue serge. The resentment was not toward Leora. Scanning them together (not haughtily, as the choosing and lofty male, but anxiously) he was more irritated than ever by Madeline. That she should be better dressed was an affront. His affection flew to guard Leora, to wrap and protect her.
And all the while he was bumbling:
“—thought you two girls ought know each other— Miss Fox, want t’ make you ’quainted with Miss Tozer—little celebration—lucky dog have two Queens of Sheba—”
And to himself, “Oh, hell!”
While they murmured nothing in particular to each other he herded them into the famous dining-room of the Grand. It was full of gilt chandeliers, red plush chairs, heavy silverware, and aged negro retainers with gold and green waistcoats. Round the walls ran select views of Pompeii, Venice, Lake Como, and Versailles.
“Swell room!” chirped Leora.
Madeline had looked as though she intended to say the same thing in longer words, but she considered the frescoes all over again and explained, “Well, it’s very large—”
He was ordering, with agony. He had appropriated four dollars for the orgy, strictly including the tip, and his standard of good food was that he must spend every cent of the four dollars. While he wondered what “Purée St. Germain” could be, and the waiter hideously stood watching behind his shoulder, Madeline fell to. She chanted with horrifying politeness:
“Mr. Arrowsmith tells me you are a nurse, Miss— Tozer.”
“Yes, sort of.”
“Do you find it interesting?”
“Well—yes—yes, I think it’s interesting.”
“I suppose it must be wonderful to relieve suffering. Of course my work— I’m taking my Doctor of Philosophy degree in English—” She made it sound as though she were taking her earldom—“it’s rather dry and detached. I have to master the growth of the language and so on and so forth. With your practical training, I suppose you’d find that rather stupid.”
“Yes, it must be—no, it must be very interesting.”
“Do you come from Zenith, Miss— Tozer?”
“No, I come from— Just a little town. Well, hardly a town ... North Dakota.”
“Oh! North Dakota!”
“Yes ... Way West.”
“Oh, yes.... Are you staying East for some time?” It was precisely what a much-resented New York cousin had once said to Madeline.
“Well, I don’t— Yes, I guess I may be here quite some time.”
“Do you, uh, do you find you like it here?”
“Oh, yes, it’s pretty nice. These big cities— So much to see.”
“‘Big’? Well, I suppose it all depends on the point of view,doesn’tit? I always think of New York as big but— Of course— Do you find the contrast to North Dakota interesting?”
“Well, of course it’s different.”
“Tell me what North Dakota’s like. I’ve always wondered about these Western states.” It was Madeline’s second plagiarism of her cousin. “What is the general impression it makes on you?”
“I don’t think I know just how you mean.”
“I mean what is the general effect? The—impression.”
“Well, it’s got lots of wheat and lots of Swedes.”
“But I mean— I suppose you’re all terribly virile and energetic, compared with us Easterners.”
“I don’t— Well, yes, maybe.”
“Have you met lots of people in Zenith?”
“Not soawfullymany.”
“Oh, have you met Dr. Birchall, that operates in your hospital? He’s such a nice man, and not just a good surgeon but frightfully talented. He sings won-derfully, and he comes from the most frightfully nice family.”
“No, I don’t think I’ve met him yet,” Leora bleated.
“Oh, you must. And he plays the slickest—the most gorgeous game of tennis. He always goes to all these millionaire parties on Royal Ridge. Frightfully smart.”
Martin now first interrupted. “Smart? Him? He hasn’t got any brains whatever.”
“My dear child, I didn’t mean ‘smart’ in that sense!” He sat alone and helpless while she again turned on Leora and ever more brightly inquired whether Leora knew this son of a corporation lawyer and that famous débutante, this hat-shop and that club. She spoke familiarly of what were known as the Leaders of Zenith Society, the personages who appeared daily in the society columns of theAdvocate-Times,the Cowxes and Van Antrims and Dodsworths. Martin was astonished by the familiarity; he remembered that she had once gone to a charity ball in Zenith but he had not known that she was so intimate with the peerage. Certainly Leora had appallingly never heard of these great ones, nor ever attended the concerts, the lectures, the recitals at which Madeline apparently spent all her glittering evenings.
Madeline shrugged a little, then, “Well— Of course with the fascinating doctors and everybody that you meet in the hospital, I suppose you’d find lectures frightfully tame. Well—” She dismissed Leora and looked patronizingly at Martin. “Are you planning some more work on the what-is-it with rabbits?”
He was grim. He could do it now, if he got it over quickly. “Madeline! Brought you two together because— Don’t know whether you cotton to each other or not, but I wish you could, because I’ve— I’m not making any excuses for myself. I couldn’t help it. I’m engaged to both of you, and I want to know—”
Madeline had sprung up. She had never looked quite so proud and fine. She stared at them, and walked away, wordless. She came back, she touched Leora’s shoulder, and quietly kissed her. “Dear, I’m sorry for you. You’ve got a job! You poor baby!” She strode away, her shoulders straight.
Hunched, frightened, Martin could not look at Leora.
He felt her hand on his. He looked up. She was smiling, easy, a little mocking. “Sandy, I warn you that I’m never going to give you up. I suppose you’re as bad as She says; I suppose I’m foolish— I’m a hussy. But you’re mine! I warn you it isn’t a bit of use your getting engaged to somebody else again. I’d tear her eyes out! Now don’t think so well of yourself! I guess you’re pretty selfish. But I don’t care. You’re mine!”
He said brokenly many things beautiful in their commonness.
She pondered, “I do feel we’re nearer together than you and Her. Perhaps you like me better because you can bully me—because I tag after you and She never would. And I know your work is more important to you than I am, maybe more important than you are. But I am stupid and ordinary and She isn’t. I simply admire you frightfully (Heaven knowswhy, but I do), while She has sense enough to make you admire Her and tag after Her.”
“No! I swear it isn’t because I can bully you, Leora— I swear it isn’t— I don’t think it is. Dearest, don’t,don’tthink she’s brighter than you are. She’s glib but— Oh, let’s stop talking! I’ve found you! My life’s begun!”
Thedifference between Martin’s relations to Madeline and to Leora was the difference between a rousing duel and a serene comradeship. From their first evening, Leora and he depended on each other’s loyalty and liking, and certain things in his existence were settled forever. Yet his absorption in her was not stagnant. He was always making discoveries about the observations of life which she kept incubating in her secret little head while she made smoke rings with her cigarettes and smiled silently. He longed for the girl Leora; she stirred him, and with gay frank passion she answered him; but to another, sexless Leora he talked more honestly than to Gottlieb or his own worried self, while with her boyish nod or an occasional word she encouraged him to confidence in his evolving ambition and disdains.
Digamma Pi fraternity was giving a dance. It was understood among the anxiously whispering medics that so cosmopolitan was the University of Winnemac becoming that they were expected to wear the symbols of respectability known as “dress-suits.” On the solitary and nervous occasion when Martin had worn evening clothes he had rented them from the Varsity Pantorium, but he must own them, now that he was going to introduce Leora to the world as his pride and flowering. Like two little old people, absorbed in each other and diffidently exploring new, unwelcoming streets of the city where their alienated children live, Martin and Leora edged into the garnished magnificence of Benson, Hanley and Koch’s, the loftiest department store in Zenith. She was intimidated by the luminous cases of mahogany and plate glass, by the opera hats and lustrous mufflers and creamy riding breeches. When he had tried on a dinner suit and come out for her approval, his long brown tie and soft-collared shirtsomewhat rustic behind the low evening waistcoat, and when the clerk had gone to fetch collars, she wailed:
“Darn it, Sandy, you’re too grand for me. I just simply can’t get myself to fuss over my clothes, and here you’re going to go and look so spiffy I won’t have a chance with you.”
He almost kissed her.
The clerk, returning, warbled, “I think, Modom, you’ll find that your husband will look vurry nice indeed in these wing collars.”
Then, while the clerk sought ties, he did kiss her, and she sighed:
“Oh, gee, you’re one of these people that get ahead. I never thought I’d have to live up to a man with a dress-suit and a come-to-Heaven collar. Oh, well, I’ll tag!”
For the Digamma Ball, the University Armory was extremely decorated. The brick walls were dizzy with bunting, spotty with paper chrysanthemums and plaster skulls and wooden scalpels ten feet long.
In six years at Mohalis, Martin had gone to less than a score of dances, though the refined titillations of communal embracing were the chief delight of the co-educational university. When he arrived at the Armory, with Leora timorously brave in a blue crêpe de chine made in no recognized style, he did not care whether he had a single two-step, though he did achingly desire to have the men crowd in and ask Leora, admire her and make her welcome. Yet he was too proud to introduce her about, lest he seem to be begging his friends to dance with her. They stood alone, under the balcony, disconsolately facing the vastness of the floor, while beyond them flashed the current of dancers, beautiful, formidable, desirable. Leora and he had assured each other that, for a student affair, dinner jacket and black waistcoat would be the thing, as stated in the Benson, Hanley and Koch Chart of Correct Gents’ Wearing Apparel, but he grew miserable at the sight of voluptuous white waistcoats, and when that embryo famous surgeon, Angus Duer, came by, disdainful as a greyhound and pushing on white gloves (which are the whitest, the most superciliously white objects on earth), then Martin felt himself a hobbledehoy.
“Come on,we’lldance,” he said, as though it were a defiance to all Angus Duers.
He very much wanted to go home.
He did not enjoy the dance, though she waltzed easily and himself not too badly. He did not even enjoy having her in his arms. He could not believe that she was in his arms. As they revolved he saw Duer join a brilliance of pretty girls and distinguished-looking women about the great Dr. Silva, dean of the medical school. Angus seemed appallingly at home, and he waltzed off with the prettiest girl, sliding, swinging, deft. Martin tried to hate him as a fool, but he remembered that yesterday Angus had been elected to the honorary society of Sigma Xi.
Leora and he crept back to the exact spot beneath the balcony where they had stood before, to their den, their one safe refuge. While he tried to be nonchalant and talk up to his new clothes, he was cursing the men he saw go by laughing with girls, ignoring his Leora.
“Not many here yet,” he fussed. “Pretty soon they’ll all be coming, and then you’ll have lots of dances.”
“Oh, I don’t mind.”
(“God, won’t somebody come and ask the poor kid?”)
He fretted over his lack of popularity among the dancing-men of the medical school. He wished Clif Clawson were present— Clif liked any sort of assembly, but he could not afford dress-clothes. Then, rejoicing as at sight of the best-beloved, he saw Irving Watters, that paragon of professional normality, wandering toward them, but Watters passed by, merely nodding. Thrice Martin hoped and desponded, and now all his pride was gone. If Leora could be happy—
“I wouldn’t care a hoot if she fell for the gabbiest fusser in the whole U., and gave me the go-by all evening. Anything to let her have a good time! If I could coax Duer over— No, that’s one thing I couldn’t stand: crawling to that dirty snob— I will!”
Up ambled Fatty Pfaff, just arrived. Martin pounced on him lovingly. “H’lo, old Fat! You a stag to-night? Meet my friend Miss Tozer.”
Fatty’s bulbous eyes showed approval of Leora’s cheeks and amber hair. He heaved, “Pleasedmeetch—dance starting—have the honor?” in so flattering a manner that Martin could have kissed him.
That he himself stood alone through the dance did not occur to him. He leaned against a pillar and gloated. He felt gorgeously unselfish.... That various girl wallflowers were sitting near him, waiting to be asked, did not occur to him either.
He saw Fatty introduce Leora to a decorative pair of Digams, one of whom begged her for the next. Thereafter she had more invitations than she could take. Martin’s excitement cooled. It seemed to him that she clung too closely to her partners, that she followed their steps too eagerly. After the fifth dance he was agitated. “Course!She’senjoying herself! Hasn’t got time to notice that I just stand here—yes, by thunder, and hold her scarf! Sure! Fine for her. Fact I might like a little dancing myself— And the way she grins and gawps at that fool Brindle Morgan, the—the—the damnedest— Oh, you and I are going to have a talk, young woman! And those hounds trying to pinch her off me—the one thing I’ve ever loved! Just because they dance better than I can, and spiel a lot of foolishness— And that damn’ orchestra playing that damn’ peppery music— And she falling for all their damn’ cheap compliments and— You and I are going to have one lovely little understanding!”
When she next returned to him, besieged by three capering medics, he muttered to her, “Oh, it doesn’tmatteraboutme!”
“Would you like this one?Courseyou shall have it!” She turned to him fully; she had none of Madeline’s sense of having to act for the benefit of observers. Through a strained eternity of waiting, while he glowered, she babbled of the floor, the size of the room, and her “dandy partners.” At the sound of the music he held out his arms.
“No,” she said. “I want to talk to you.” She led him to a corner and hurled at him, “Sandy, this is the last time I’m going to stand for your looking jealous. Oh, I know! See here! If we’re going to stick together—and we are!— I’m going to dance with just as many men as I want to, and I’m going to be just as foolish with ’em as I want to. Dinners and those things— I suppose I’ll always go on being a clam. Nothing to say. But I love dancing, and I’m going to do exactly what I want to, and if you had any sense whatever, you’d know I don’t care a hang for anybody but you. Yours! Absolute. No matter what fool things you do—and they’llprobably be a plenty. So when you go and get jealous on me again, you sneak off and get rid of it. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself!”
“I wasn’t jealous— Yes, I was. Oh, I can’t help it! I love you so much. I’d be one fine lover, now wouldn’t I, if I never got jealous!”
“All right. Only you’ve got to keep it under cover. Now we’ll finish the dance.”
He was her slave.
It was regarded as immoral, at the University of Winnemac, to dance after midnight, and at that hour the guests crowded into the Imperial Cafeteria. Ordinarily it closed at eight, but to-night it kept open till one, and developed a spirit of almost lascivious mirth. Fatty Pfaff did a jig, another humorous student, with a napkin over his arm, pretended to be a waiter, and a girl (but she was much disapproved) smoked a cigarette.
At the door Clif Clawson was waiting for Martin and Leora. He was in his familiar shiny gray suit, with a blue flannel shirt.
Clif assumed that he was the authority to whom all of Martin’s friends must be brought for judgment. He had not met Leora. Martin had confessed his double engagement; he had explained that Leora was unquestionably the most gracious young woman on earth; but as he had previously used up all of his laudatory adjectives and all of Clif’s patience on the subject of Madeline, Clif failed to listen, and prepared to dislike Leora as another siren of morality.
He eyed her now with patronizing enmity. He croaked at Martin, behind her back, “Good-looking kid, I will say that for her—what’s wrong with her?” When they had brought their own sandwiches and coffee and mosaic cake from the long counter, Clif rasped:
“Well, it’s grand of a couple of dress-suit swells like you to assassinate with me ’mid the midmosts of sartorials and Sassiety. Gosh, it’s fierce I had to miss the select pleasures of an evening with Anxious Duer and associated highboys, and merely play a low game of poker—in which Father deftly removed the sum of six simolea, point ten, from the foregathered bums and yahoos. Well, Leory, I suppose you and Martykins here have now ratiocinated all these questions of polo and, uh, Monte Carlo and so on.”
She had an immense power of accepting people as they were. While Clif waited, leering, she placidly investigated the inside of a chicken sandwich and assented, “Um-huh.”
“Good boy! I thought you were going to pull that ‘If you are a roughneck, I don’t see why you think you’ve got to boast about it’ stuff that Mart springs on me!”
Clif turned into a jovial and (for him) unusually quiet companion.... Ex-farmhand, ex-book-agent, ex-mechanic, he had so little money yet so scratching a desire to be resplendent that he took refuge in pride in poverty, pride in being offensive. Now, when Leora seemed to look through his boasting, he liked her as quickly as had Martin, and they buzzed with gaiety. Martin was warmed to benevolence toward mankind, including Angus Duer, who was at the end of the room at a table with Dean Silva and his silvery women. Without plan, Martin sprang up, raced down the room. Holding out his hand he clamored:
“Angus, old man, want to congratulate you on getting Sigma Xi. That’s fine.”
Duer regarded the outstretched hand as though it was an instrument which he had seen before but whose use he could not quite remember. He picked it up and shook it tentatively. He did not turn his back; he was worse than rude—he looked patient.
“Well, good luck,” said Martin, chilled and shaky.
“Very good of you. Thanks.”
Martin returned to Leora and Clif, to tell them the incident as a cosmic tragedy. They agreed that Angus Duer was to be shot. In the midst of it Duer came past, trailing after Dean Silva’s party, and nodded to Martin, who glared back, feeling noble and mature.
At parting, Clif held Leora’s hand and urged, “Honey, I think a lot of Mart, and one time I was afraid the old kid was going to get tied up to—to parties that would turn him into a hand-shaker. I’m a hand-shaker myself. I know less about medicine than Prof Robertshaw. But this boob has some conscience to him, and I’m so darn’ glad he’s playing around with a girl that’s real folks and— Oh, listen at mefallin’ all over my clumsy feet! But I just mean I hope you won’t mind Uncle Clif saying he does by golly like you a lot!”
It was almost four when Martin returned from taking Leora home and sagged into bed. He could not sleep. The aloofness of Angus Duer racked him as an insult to himself, as somehow an implied insult to Leora, but his boyish rage had passed into a bleaker worry. Didn’t Duer, for all his snobbishness and shallowness, have something that he himself lacked? Didn’t Clif, with his puppy-dog humor, his speech of a vaudeville farmer, his suspicion of fine manners as posing, take life too easily? Didn’t Duer know how to control and drive his hard little mind? Wasn’t there a technique of manners as there was of experimentation.... Gottlieb’s fluent bench-technique versus the clumsy and podgy hands of Ira Hinkley.... Or was all this inquiry a treachery, a yielding to Duer’s own affected standard?
He was so tired that behind his closed eyelids were flashes of fire. His whirling mind flew over every sentence he had said or heard that night, till round his twisting body there was fevered shouting.
As he grumped across the medical campus next day, he came unexpectedly upon Angus and he was smitten with the guiltiness and embarrassment one has toward a person who has borrowed money and probably will not return it. Mechanically he began to blurt “Hello,” but he checked it in a croak, scowled, and stumbled on.
“Oh, Mart,” Angus called. He was dismayingly even. “Remember speaking to me last evening? It struck me when I was going out that you looked huffy. I was wondering if you thought I’d been rude. I’m sorry if you did. Fact is, I had a rotten headache. Look. I’ve got four tickets for ‘As It Listeth,’ in Zenith, next Friday evening—original New York cast! Like to see it? And I noticed you were with a peach, at the dance. Suppose she might like to go along with us, she and some friend of hers?”
“Why—gosh— I’ll ’phone her—darn’ nice of you to ask us—”
It was not till melancholy dusk, when Leora had acceptedand promised to bring with her a probationer-nurse named Nelly Byers, that Martin began to brood:
“Wonder if he did have a headache last night?
“Wonder if somebodygavehim the tickets?
“Why didn’t he ask Dad Silva’s daughter to go with us? Does he think Leora is some tart I’ve picked up?
“Sure, he never really quarrels with anybody—wants to keep us all friendly, so we’ll send him surgical patients some day when we’re hick G. P.’s and he’s a Great and Only.
“Why did I crawl down so meekly?
“I don’t care! If Leora enjoys it— Me personally, I don’t care two hoots for all this trotting around— Though of course it isn’t so bad to see pretty women in fine clothes, and be dressed as good as anybody— Oh, I don’tknow!”
In the slightly Midwestern city of Zenith, the appearance of a play “with the original New York cast” was an event. (What play it was did not much matter.) The Dodsworth Theatre was splendid with the aristocracy from the big houses on Royal Ridge. Leora and Nelly Byers admired the bloods—graduates of Yale and Harvard and Princeton, lawyers and bankers, motor-manufacturers and inheritors of real estate, virtuosi of golf, familiars of New York—who with their shrill and glistening women occupied the front rows. Miss Byers pointed out the Dodsworths, who were often mentioned inTown Topics.
Leora and Miss Byers bounced with admiration of the hero when he refused the governorship; Martin worried because the heroine was prettier than Leora; and Angus Duer (who gave an appearance of knowing all about plays without having seen more than half a dozen in his life) admitted that the set depicting “Jack Vanduzen’s Camp in the Adirondacks: Sunset, the Next Day” was really very nice.
Martin was in a mood of determined hospitality. He was going to give them supper and that was all there was to it. Miss Byers explained that they had to be in the hospital by a quarter after eleven, but Leora said lazily, “Oh, I don’t care. I’ll slip in through a window. If you’re there in the morning, the Old Cat can’t prove you got in late.” Shaking her head at this lying wickedness, Miss Byers fled to a trolley car, whileLeora, Angus, and Martin strolled to Epstein’s Alt Nuremberg Café for beer and Swiss cheese sandwiches flavored by the sight of German drinking mottos and papier-mâché armor.
Angus was studying Leora, looking from her to Martin, watching their glances of affection. That a keen young man should make a comrade of a girl who could not bring him social advancement, that such a thing as the boy and girl passion between Martin and Leora could exist, was probably inconceivable to him. He decided that she was conveniently frail. He gave Martin a refined version of a leer, and set himself to acquiring her for his own uses.
“I hope you enjoyed the play,” he condescended to her.
“Oh, yes—”
“Jove, I envy you two. Of course I understand why girls fall for Martin here, with his romantic eyes, but a grind like me, I have to go on working without a single person to give me sympathy. Oh, well, I deserve it for being shy of women.”
With unexpected defiance from Leora: “When anybody says that, it means they’re not shy, and they despise women.”
“Despise them? Why, child, honestly, I long to be a Don Juan. But I don’t know how. Won’t you give me a lesson?” Angus’s aridly correct voice had become lulling; he concentrated on Leora as he would have concentrated on dissecting a guinea pig. She smiled at Martin now and then to say, “Don’t be jealous, idiot. I’m magnificently uninterested in this conceited hypnotist.” But she was flustered by Angus’s sleek assurance, by his homage to her eyes and wit and reticence.
Martin twitched with jealousy. He blurted that they must be going— Leora really had to be back— The trolleys ran infrequently after midnight and they walked to the hospital through hollow and sounding streets. Angus and Leora kept up a high-strung chatter, while Martin stalked beside them, silent, sulky, proud of being sulky. Skittering through a garage alley they came out on the mass of Zenith General Hospital, a block long, five stories of bleak windows with infrequent dim blotches of light. No one was about. The first floor was but five feet from the ground, and they lifted Leora up to the limestone ledge of a half-open corridor window. She slid in, whispering, “G’night! Thanks!”
Martin felt empty, dissatisfied. The night was full of a chill mournfulness. A light was suddenly flickering in a window above them, and there was a woman’s scream breaking down into moans. He felt the tragedy of parting—that in the briefness of life he should lose one moment of her living presence.
“I’m going in after her; see she gets there safe,” he said.
The frigid edge of the stone sill bit his hands, but he vaulted, thrust up his knee, crawled hastily through the window. Ahead of him, in the cork-floored hallway lit only by a tiny electric globe, Leora was tiptoeing toward a flight of stairs. He ran after her, on his toes. She squeaked as he caught her arm.
“We got to say good-night better than that!” he grumbled. “With that damn’ Duer—”
“Ssssssh! They’d simply murder me if they caught you here. Do you want to get me fired?”
“Would you care, if it was because of me?”
“Yes—no—well— But they’d probably fire you from medic school, my lad. If—” His caressing hands could feel her shiver with anxiety. She peered along the corridor, and his quickened imagination created sneaking forms, eyes peering from doorways. She sighed, then, resolutely: “We can’t talk here. We’ll slip up to my room—roommate’s away for the week. Stand there, in the shadow. If nobody in sight upstairs, I’ll come back.”
He followed her to the floor above, to a white door, then breathlessly inside. As he closed the door he was touched by this cramped refuge, with its camp-beds and photographs from home and softly wrinkled linen. He clasped her, but with hand against his chest she forbade him, as she mourned:
“You were jealous again! How can you distrust me so? With that fool! Women not like him? They wouldn’t have a chance! Likes himself too well. And then you jealous!”
“I wasn’t— Yes, I was, but I don’t care! To have to sit there and grin like a hyena, with him between us, when I wanted to talk to you, to kiss you! All right! Probably I’ll always be jealous. It’s you that have got to trust me. I’m not easy-going; never will be. Oh, trust me—”
Their profound and unresisted kiss was the more blind in memory of that barren hour with Angus. They forgot that the superintendent of nurses might dreadfully come bursting in; they forgot that Angus was waiting. “Oh, curse Angus—let him go home!” was Martin’s only reflection, as his eyes closed and his long loneliness vanished.
“Good night, dear love—my love forever,” he exulted.
In the still ghostliness of the hall, he laughed as he thought of how irritably Angus must have marched away. But from the window he discovered Angus huddled on the stone steps, asleep. As he touched the ground, he whistled, but stopped short. He saw bursting from the shadow a bulky man, vaguely in a porter’s uniform, who was shouting:
“I’ve caught yuh! Back you come into the hospital, and we’ll find out what you’ve been up to!”
They closed. Martin was wiry, but in the watchman’s clasp he was smothered. There was a reek of dirty overalls, of unbathed flesh. Martin kicked his shins, struck at his boulder of red cheek, tried to twist his arm. He broke loose, started to flee, and halted. The struggle, in its contrast to the aching sweetness of Leora, had infuriated him. He faced the watchman, raging.
From the awakened Angus, suddenly appearing beside him, there was a thin sound of disgust. “Oh, comeon! Let’s get out of this. Why do you dirty your hands on scum like him?”