The watchman bellowed, “Oh, I’m scum, am I? I’ll show you!”
He collared Angus and slapped him.
Under the sleepy street-lamp, Martin saw a man go mad. It was not the unfeeling Angus Duer who stared at the watchman; it was a killer, and his eyes were the terrible eyes of the killer, speaking to the least experienced a message of death. He gasped only, “He dared to touch me!” A pen-knife was somehow in his hands, he had leaped at the watchman, and he was busily and earnestly endeavoring to cut his throat.
As Martin tried to hold them he heard the agitated pounding of a policeman’s night stick on the pavement. Martin was slim but he had pitched hay and strung telephone wire. He hit the watchman, judiciously, beside the left ear, snatched Angus’s wrist, and dragged him away. They ran up an alley, across a courtyard. They came to a thoroughfare as an owl trolley glowed and rattled round the corner; they ran beside it, swung up on the steps, and were safe.
Angus stood on the back platform, sobbing. “My God, I wish I’d killed him! He laid his filthy hands on me! Martin! Hold me here on the car. I thought I’d got over that. Once when I was a kid I tried to kill a fellow— God, I wish I’d cut that filthy swine’s throat!”
As the trolley came into the center of the city, Martin coaxed, “There’s an all-night lunch up Oberlin Avenue where we can get some white mule. Come on. It’ll straighten you up.”
Angus was shaky and stumbling— Angus the punctilious. Martin led him into the lunch-room where, between catsup bottles, they had raw whisky in granite-like coffee cups. Angus leaned his head on his arm and sobbed, careless of stares, till he had drunk himself into obliteration, and Martin steered him home. Then to Martin, in his furnished room with Clif snoring, the evening became incredible and nothing more incredible than Angus Duer. “Well, he’ll be a good friend of mine now, for always. Fine!”
Next morning, in the hall of the Anatomy Building, he saw Angus and rushed toward him. Angus snapped, “You were frightfully stewed last night, Arrowsmith. If you can’t handle your liquor better than that, you better cut it out entirely.”
He walked on, clear-eyed, unruffled.
Andalways Martin’s work went on—assisting Max Gottlieb, instructing bacteriological students, attending lectures and hospital demonstrations—sixteen merciless hours to the day. He stole occasional evenings for original research or for peering into the stirring worlds of French and German bacteriological publications; he went proudly now and then to Gottlieb’s cottage where, against rain-smeared brown wall-paper, were Blake drawings and a signed portrait of Koch. But the rest was nerve-gnawing.
Neurology, O.B., internal medicine, physical diagnosis; always a few pages more than he could drudge through before he fell asleep at his rickety study-table.
Memorizing of gynecology, of ophthalmology, till his mind was burnt raw.
Droning afternoons of hospital demonstrations, among stumbling students barked at by tired clinical professors.
The competitive exactions of surgery on dogs, in which Angus Duer lorded it with impatient perfection.
Martin admired the professor of internal medicine, T. J. H. Silva, known as “Dad” Silva, who was also dean of the medical faculty. He was a round little man with a little crescent of mustache. Silva’s god was Sir William Osler, his religion was the art of sympathetic healing, and his patriotism was accurate physical diagnosis. He was a Doc Vickerson of Elk Mills, grown wiser and soberer and more sure. But Martin’s reverence for Dean Silva was counterbalanced by his detestation for Dr. Roscoe Geake, professor of otolaryngology.
Roscoe Geake was a pedler. He would have done well with oil stock. As an otolaryngologist he believed that tonsils had been placed in the human organism for the purpose of providing specialists with closed motors. A physician who left the tonsils in any patient was, he felt, foully and ignorantly overlooking his future health and comfort—the physician’s future health and comfort. His earnest feeling regarding the nasalseptum was that it never hurt any patient to have part of it removed, and if the most hopeful examination could find nothing the matter with the patient’s nose and throat except that he was smoking too much, still, in any case, the enforced rest after an operation was good for him. Geake denounced this cant about Letting Nature Alone. Why, the average well-to-do man appreciated attention! He really didn’t think much of his specialists unless he was operated on now and then—just a little and not very painfully. Geake had one classic annual address in which, winging far above otolaryngology, he evaluated all medicine, and explained to grateful healers like Irving Watters the method of getting suitable fees:
“Knowledge is the greatest thing in the medical world but it’s no good whatever unless you can sell it, and to do this you must first impress your personality on the people who have the dollars. Whether a patient is a new or an old friend, you must always usesalesmanshipon him. Explain to him, also to his stricken and anxious family, the hard work and thought you are giving to his case, and so make him feel that the good you have done him, or intend to do him, is even greater than the fee you plan to charge. Then, when he gets your bill, he will not misunderstand or kick.”
There was, as yet, no vision in Martin of serene spaciousness of the mind. Beyond doubt he was a bustling young man, and rather shrill. He had no uplifted moments when he saw himself in relation to the whole world—if indeed he realized that there was a deal of the world besides himself. His friend Clif was boorish, his beloved Leora was rustic, however gallant she might be, and he himself wasted energy in hectic busyness and in astonishment at dullness. But if he had not ripened, yet he was close to earth, he did hate pretentiousness, he did use his hands, and he did seek iron actualities with a curiosity inextinguishable.
And at infrequent times he perceived the comedy of life; relaxed for a gorgeous hour from the intensity wearing to his admirers. Such was the hour before Christmas vacation when Roscoe Geake rose to glory.
It was announced in theWinnemac Daily Newsthat Dr. Geake had been called from the chair of otolaryngology to thevice-presidency of the puissant New Idea Medical Instrument and Furniture Company of Jersey City. In celebration he gave a final address to the entire medical school on “The Art and Science of Furnishing the Doctor’s Office.”
He was a neatly finished person, Geake, eye-glassed and enthusiastic and fond of people. He beamed on his loving students and cried:
“Gentlemen, the trouble with too many doctors, even those splendid old pioneer war-horses who through mud and storm, through winter’s chill blast and August’s untempered heat, go bringing cheer and surcease from pain to the world’s humblest, yet even these old Nestors not so infrequently settle down in a rut and never shake themselves loose. Now that I am leaving this field where I have labored so long and happily, I want to ask every man jack of you to read, before you begin to practise medicine, not merely your Rosenau and Howell and Gray, but also, as a preparation for being that which all good citizens must be, namely, practical men, a most valuable little manual of modern psychology, ‘How to Put Pep in Salesmanship,’ by Grosvenor A. Bibby. For don’t forget, gentlemen, and this is my last message to you, the man worth while is not merely the man who takes things with a smile but also the man who’s trained in philosophy,practicalphilosophy, so that instead of day-dreaming and spending all his time talking about ‘ethics,’ splendid though they are, and ‘charity,’ glorious virtue though that be, yet he never forgets that unfortunately the world judges a man by the amount of good hard cash he can lay away. The graduates of the University of Hard Knocks judge a physician as they judge a business man, not merely by his alleged ‘high ideals’ but by the horse-power he puts into carrying them out—and making them pay! And from a scientific standpoint, don’t overlook the fact that the impression of properly remunerated competence which you make on a patient is of just as much importance, in these days of the new psychology, as the drugs you get into him or the operations he lets you get away with. The minute he begins to see that other folks appreciate and reward your skill, that minute he must begin to feel your power and so to get well.
“Nothing is more important in inspiring him than to have such an office that as soon as he steps into it, you have begun to sell him the idea of being properly cured. I don’t carewhether a doctor has studied in Germany, Munich, Baltimore, and Rochester. I don’t care whether he has all science at his finger-tips, whether he can instantly diagnose with a considerable degree of accuracy the most obscure ailment, whether he has the surgical technique of a Mayo, a Crile, a Blake, an Ochsner, a Cushing. If he has a dirty old office, with hand-me-down chairs and a lot of second-hand magazines, then the patient isn’t going to have confidence in him; he is going to resist the treatment—and the doctor is going to have difficulty in putting over and collecting an adequate fee.
“To go far below the surface of this matter into the fundamental philosophy and esthetics of office-furnishing for the doctor, there are to-day two warring schools, the Tapestry School and the Aseptic School, if I may venture to so denominate and conveniently distinguish them. Both of them have their merits. The Tapestry School claims that luxurious chairs for waiting patients, handsome hand-painted pictures, a bookcase jammed with the world’s best literature in expensively bound sets, together with cut-glass vases and potted palms, produce an impression of that opulence which can come only from sheer ability and knowledge. The Aseptic School, on the other hand, maintains that what the patient wants is that appearance of scrupulous hygiene which can be produced only by furnishing the outer waiting-room as well as the inner offices in white-painted chairs and tables, with merely a Japanese print against a gray wall.
“But, gentlemen, it seems obvious to me, so obvious that I wonder it has not been brought out before, that the ideal reception-room is a combination of these two schools! Have your potted palms and handsome pictures—to the practical physician they are as necessary a part of his working equipment as a sterilizer or a Baumanometer. But so far as possible have everything in sanitary-looking white—and think of the color-schemes you can evolve, or the good wife for you, if she be one blessed with artistic tastes! Rich golden or red cushions, in a Morris chair enameled the purest white! A floor-covering of white enamel, with just a border of delicate rose! Recent and unspotted numbers of expensive magazines, with art covers, lying on a white table! Gentlemen, there is the idea of imaginative salesmanship which I wish to leave with you; there is the gospel which I hope to spread inmy fresh field of endeavor, the New Ideal Instrument Company of Jersey City, where at any time I shall be glad to see and shake by the hand any and all of you.”
Through the storm of his Christmas examinations, Martin had an intensified need of Leora. She had been summoned home to Dakota, perhaps for months, on the ground that her mother was unwell, and he had, or thought he had, to see her daily. He must have slept less than four hours a night. Grinding at examinations on the interurban car, he dashed in to her, looking up to scowl when he thought of the lively interns and the men patients whom she met in the hospital, scorning himself for being so primitive, and worrying all over again. To see her at all, he had to wait for hours in the lobby, or walk up and down in the snow outside till she could slip to a window and peep out. When they were together, they were completely absorbed. She had a genius for frank passion; she teased him, tantalized him, but she was tender and unafraid.
He was sick lonely when he saw her off at the Union Station.
His examination papers were competent but, save in bacteriology and internal medicine, they were sketchy. He turned emptily to the laboratory for vacation time.
He had so far displayed more emotion than achievement in his tiny original researches. Gottlieb was patient. “It iss a fine system, this education. All what we cram into the students, not Koch and two dieners could learn. Do not worry about the research. We shall do it yet.” But he expected Martin to perform a miracle or two in the whole fortnight of the holidays and Martin had no stomach with which to think. He played in the laboratory; he spent his time polishing glassware, and when he transplanted cultures from his rabbits, his notes were incomplete.
Gottlieb was instantly grim. “Wass giebt es dann?Do you call these notes? Always when I praise a man must he stop working? Do you think that you are a Theobald Smith or a Novy that you should sit and meditate? You have the ability of Pfaff!”
For once, Martin was impenitent. He mumbled to himself, as Gottlieb stamped out like a Grand Duke, “Rats, I’vegotsomerest coming to me. Gosh, most fellows, why, they go to swell homes for vacation, and have dances and fathers and everything. If Leora was here, we’d go to a show to-night.”
He viciously seized his cap (a soggy and doubtful object), sought Clif Clawson, who was spending the vacation in sleeping between poker games at Barney’s, and outlined a project of going into town and getting drunk. It was executed so successfully that during vacation it was repeated whenever he thought of the coming torture-wheel of uninspiring work, whenever he realized that it was only Gottlieb and Leora who held him here. After vacation, in late January, he found that whisky relieved him from the frenzy of work, from the terror of loneliness—then betrayed him and left him the more weary, the more lonely. He felt suddenly old; he was twenty-four now, he reminded himself, and a schoolboy, his real work not even begun. Clif was his refuge; Clif admired Leora and would listen to his babbling of her.
But Clif and Martin came to the misfortune of Founder’s Day.
January thirtieth, the birthday of the late Dr. Warburton Stonedge, founder of the medical department of Winnemac, was annually celebrated by a banquet rich in fraternalism and speeches and large lack of wine. All the faculty reserved their soundest observations for the event, and all the students were expected to be present.
This year it was held in the large hall of the University Y. M. C. A., a moral apartment with red wall paper, portraits of whiskered alumni who had gone out to be missionaries, and long thin pine boxes intended to resemble exposed oak beams. About the famous guests— Dr. Rouncefield the Chicago surgeon, a diabetes specialist from Omaha, a Pittsburg internist—stood massed the faculty members. They tried to look festal, but they were worn and nervous after four months of school. They had wrinkles and tired eyes. They were all in business suits, mostly unpressed. They sounded scientific and interested; they used words like phlebarteriectasia and hepatocholangio-enterostomy, and they asked the guests, “So you just been in Rochester? What’s, uh, what’re Charley and Will doing in orthopedics?” But they were full of hunger and melancholy. It was half-past seven, and they who did not normally dine at seven, dined at six-thirty.
Upon this seedy gaiety entered a splendor, a tremendous black-bearded personage, magnificent of glacial shirt-bosom, vast of brow, wild-eyed with genius or with madness. In a marvelous great voice, with a flavor of German accent, he inquired for Dr. Silva, and sailed into the dean’s group like a frigate among fishing-smacks.
“Who the dickens is that?” wondered Martin.
“Let’s edge in and find out,” said Clif, and they clung to the fast increasing knot about Dean Silva and the mystery, who was introduced as Dr. Benoni Carr, the pharmacologist.
They heard Dr. Carr, to the pale admiration of the school-bound assistant professors, boom genially of working with Schmiedeberg in Germany on the isolation of dihydroxypentamethylendiamin, of the possibilities of chemotherapy, of the immediate cure of sleeping sickness, of the era of scientific healing. “Though I am American-born, I have the advantage of speaking German from a child, and so perhaps I can better understand the work of my dear friend Ehrlich. I saw him receive a decoration from His Imperial Highness the Kaiser. Dear old Ehrlich, he was like a child!”
There was at this time (but it changed curiously in 1914 and 1915) an active Germanophile section of the faculty. They bent before this tornado of erudition. Angus Duer forgot that he was Angus Duer; and Martin listened with excited stimulation. Benoni Carr had all of Gottlieb’s individuality, all his scorn of machine-made teachers, all his air of a great world which showed Mohalis as provincial, with none of Gottlieb’s nervous touchiness. Martin wished Gottlieb were present; he wondered whether the two giants would clash.
Dr. Carr was placed at the speakers’ table, near the dean. Martin was astonished to see the eminent pharmacologist, after a shocked inspection of the sour chicken and mishandled salad which made up most of the dinner, pour something into his water glass from a huge silver flask—and pour that something frequently. He became boisterous. He leaned across two men to slap the indignant dean on the shoulder; he contradicted his neighbors; he sang a stanza of “I’m Bound Away for the Wild Missourai.”
Few phenomena at the dinner were so closely observed by the students as the manners of Dr. Benoni Carr.
After an hour of strained festivity, when Dean Silva had risen to announce the speakers, Carr lumbered to his feet and shouted, “Let’s not have any speeches. Only fools make speeches. Wise men sing songs. Whoopee! Oh, tireolee, oh, tireolee, oh, tireolee a lady! You profs are the bunk!”
Dean Silva was to be seen beseeching him, then leading him out of the room, with the assistance of two professors and a football tackle, and in the hush of a joyful horror Clif grunted to Martin:
“Here’s where I get mine! And the damn’ fool promised to stay sober!”
“Huh?”
“I might of known he’d show up stewed and spill the beans. Oh, maybe the dean won’t hand me hell proper!”
He explained. Dr. Benoni Carr was born Benno Karkowski. He had graduated from a medical school which gave degrees in two years. He had read vastly, but he had never been in Europe. He had been “spieler” in medicine shows, chiropodist, spiritualist medium, esoteric teacher, head of sanitariums for the diversion of neurotic women. Clif had encountered him in Zenith, when they were both drunk. It was Clif who had told Dean Silva that the celebrated pharmacologist, just back from Europe, was in Zenith for a few days and perhaps might accept an invitation—
The dean had thanked Clif ardently.
The banquet ended early, and there was inadequate attention to Dr. Rouncefield’s valuable address on the Sterilization of Catgut.
Clif sat up worrying, and admitting the truth of Martin’s several observations. Next day—he had a way with women when he deigned to take the trouble—he pumped the dean’s girl secretary, and discovered his fate. There had been a meeting of a faculty committee; the blame for the Benoni Carr outrage had been placed on Clif; and the dean had said all the things Clif had imagined, with a number which he had not possessed the talent to conceive. But the dean was not going to summon him at once; he was going to keep him waiting in torture, then execute him in public.
“Good-by, old M.D. degree! Rats, I never thought much of the doctor business. Guess I’ll be a bond salesman,” said Clif to Martin. He strolled away, he went to the dean, and remarked:
“Oh, Dean Silva, I just dropped in to tell you I’ve decided to resign from the medic school. Been offered a big job in, uh, in Chicago, and I don’t think much of the way you run the school, anyway. Too much memorizing and too little real spirit of science. Good luck, Doc. So long.”
“Gggggg—” said Dean Silva.
Clif moved into Zenith, and Martin was left alone. He gave up the double room at the front of his boarding-house for a hall-room at the rear, and in that narrow den he sat and mourned in a desolation of loneliness. He looked out on a vacant lot in which a tattered advertisement of pork and beans flapped on a leaning billboard. He saw Leora’s eyes and heard Clif’s comfortable scoffing, and the quiet was such as he could not endure.
Thepersistent yammer of a motor horn drew Martin to the window of the laboratory, a late afternoon in February. He looked down on a startling roadster, all streamlines and cream paint, with enormous headlights. He slowly made out that the driver, a young man in coffee-colored loose motor coat and hectic checked cap and intense neckwear, was Clif Clawson, and that Clif was beckoning.
He hastened down, and Clif cried:
“Oh, boy! How do you like the boat? Do you diagnose this suit? Scotch heather—honest! Uncle Clif has nabbed off a twenty-five-buck-a-week jobwithcommissions, selling autos. Boy, I was lost in your old medic school. I can sell anything to anybody. In a year I’ll be making eighty a week. Jump in, old son. I’m going to take you in to the Grand and blow you to the handsomest feed you ever stuffed into your skinny organism.”
The thirty-eight miles an hour at which Clif drove into Zenith was, in 1908, dismaying speed. Martin discovered a new Clif. He was as noisy as ever, but more sure, glowing with schemes for immediately acquiring large sums of money. His hair, once bushy and greasy in front, tending to stick out jaggedly behind, was sleek now, and his face had the pinkness of massage. He stopped at the fabulous Grand Hotel with a jar of brakes; before he left the car he changed his violent yellow driving-gauntlets for a pair of gray gloves with black stitching, which he immediately removed as he paraded through the lobby. He called the coat-girl “Sweetie,” and at the dining-room door he addressed the head-waiter:
“Ah, Gus, how’s the boy, how’s the boy feeling to-night? How’s the mucho famoso majordomoso? Gus, want to make you ’quainted with Dr. Arrowsmith. Any time the doc comes here I want you to shake a leg and hand him out that well-known service, my boy, and give him anything he wants, and if he’s broke, you charge it to me. Now, Gus, I want a nicelittle table for two, with garage and hot and cold water, and wouldst fain have thy advice, Gustavus, on the oysters and hore duffers and all the ingredients fair of a Mæcenan feast.”
“Yes, sir, right this way, Mr. Clawson,” breathed the head-waiter.
Clif whispered to Martin, “I’ve got him like that in two weeks! You watch my smoke!”
While Clif was ordering, a man stopped beside their table. He resembled an earnest traveling-man who liked to get back to his suburban bungalow every Saturday evening. He was beginning to grow slightly bald, slightly plump. His rimless eye-glasses, in the midst of a round smooth face, made him seem innocent. He stared about as though he wished he had some one with whom to dine. Clif darted up, patted the man’s elbow, and bawled:
“Ah, there, Babski, old boy. Feeding with anybody? Come join the Sporting Gents’ Association.”
“All right, be glad to. Wife’s out of town,” said the man.
“Shake hands with Dr. Arrowsmith. Mart, meet George F. Babbitt, the hoch-gecelebrated Zenith real-estate king. Mr. Babbitt has just adorned his thirty-fourth birthday by buying his first benzine buggy from yours truly and beg to remain as always.”
It was, at least on the part of Clif and Mr. Babbitt, a mirthful affair, and when Martin had joined them in cocktails, St. Louis beer, and highballs, he saw that Clif was the most generous person now living, and Mr. George F. Babbitt a companion of charm.
Clif explained how certain he was—apparently his distinguished medical training had something to do with it—to be president of a motor factory, and Mr. Babbitt confided:
“You fellows are a lot younger than I am, eight-ten years, and you haven’t learned yet, like I have, that where the big pleasure is, is in Ideals and Service and a Public Career. Now just between you and me and the gatepost, my vogue doesn’t lie in real estate but in oratory. Fact, one time I planned to study law and go right in for politics. Just between ourselves, and I don’t want this to go any farther, I’ve been making some pretty good affiliations lately—been meeting some of the rising young Republican politicians. Of course a fellow has got to start in modestly, but I may say,sotto voce, that I expect to run for alderman next fall. It’s practically only astep from that to mayor and then to governor of the state, and if I find the career suits me, there’s no reason why in ten or twelve years, say in 1918 or 1920, I shouldn’t have the honor of representing the great state of Winnemac in Washington, D. C.!”
In the presence of a Napoleon like Clif and a Gladstone like George F. Babbitt, Martin perceived his own lack of power and business skill, and when he had returned to Mohalis he was restless. Of his poverty he had rarely thought, but now, in contrast to Clif’s rich ease, his own shabby clothes and his pinched room seemed shameful.
A long letter from Leora, hinting that she might not be able to return to Zenith, left him the more lonely. Nothing seemed worth doing. In that listless state he was mooning about the laboratory during elementary bacteriology demonstration hour, when Gottlieb sent him to the basement to bring up six male rabbits for inoculation. Gottlieb was working eighteen hours a day on new experiments; he was jumpy and testy; he gave orders like insults. When Martin came dreamily back with six females instead of males, Gottlieb shrieked at him, “You are the worst fool that was ever in this lab!”
The groundlings, second-year men who were not unmindful of Martin’s own scoldings, tittered like small animals, and jarred him into raging, “Well, I couldn’t make out what you said. And it’s the first time I ever fell down. I won’t stand your talking to me like that!”
“You will stand anything I say! Clumsy! You can take your hat and get out!”
“You mean I’m fired as assistant?”
“I am glad you haf enough intelligence to understand that, no matter how wretchet I talk!”
Martin flung away. Gottlieb suddenly looked bewildered and took a step toward Martin’s retreating back. But the class, the small giggling animals, they stood delighted, hoping for more, and Gottlieb shrugged, glared them into terror, sent the least awkward of them for the rabbits, and went on, curiously quiet.
And Martin, at Barney’s dive, was hotly drinking the first of the whiskys which sent him wandering all night, by himself.With each drink he admitted that he had an excellent chance to become a drunkard, and with each he boasted that he did not care. Had Leora been nearer than Wheatsylvania, twelve hundred miles away, he would have fled to her for salvation. He was still shaky next morning, and he had already taken a drink to make it possible to live through the morning when he received the note from Dean Silva bidding him report to the office at once.
The dean lectured:
“Arrowsmith, you’ve been discussed a good deal by the faculty council of late. Except in one or two courses—in my own I have no fault to find—you have been very inattentive. Your marks have been all right, but you could do still better. Recently you have also been drinking. You have been seen in places of very low repute, and you have been intimate with a man who took it upon himself to insult me, the Founder, our guests, and the University. Various faculty members have complained of your superior attitude—making fun of our courses right out in class! But Dr. Gottlieb has always warmly defended you. He insisted that you have a real flair for investigative science. Last night, however, he admitted that you had recently been impertinent to him. Now unless you immediately turn over a new leaf, young man, I shall have to suspend you for the rest of the year and, if that doesn’t do the work, I shall have to ask for your resignation. And I think it might be a good thing for your humility—you seem to have the pride of the devil, young man!—it might be a good idea for you to see Dr. Gottlieb and start off your reformation by apologizing—”
It was the whisky spoke, not Martin:
“I’m damned if I will! He can go to the devil! I’ve given him my life, and then he tattles on me—”
“That’s absolutely unfair to Dr. Gottlieb. He merely—”
“Sure. He merely let me down. I’ll see him in hell before I’ll apologize, after the way I’ve worked for him. And as for Clif Clawson that you were hinting at—him ‘take it on himself to insult anybody’? He just played a joke, and you went after his scalp. I’m glad he did it!”
Then Martin waited for the words that would end his scientific life.
The little man, the rosy, pudgy, good little man, he stared and hummed and spoke softly:
“Arrowsmith, I could fire you right now, of course, but I believe you have good stuff in you. I decline to let you go. Naturally, you’re suspended, at least till you come to your senses and apologize to me and to Gottlieb.” He was fatherly; almost he made Martin repent; but he concluded, “And as for Clawson, his ‘joke’ regarding this Benoni Carr person—and why I never looked the fellow up is beyond me, I suppose I was too busy—his ‘joke,’ as you call it, was the action either of an idiot or a blackguard, and until you are able to perceive that fact, I don’t think you will be ready to come back to us.”
“All right,” said Martin, and left the room.
He was very sorry for himself. The real tragedy, he felt, was that though Gottlieb had betrayed him and ended his career, ended the possibility of his mastering science and of marrying Leora, he still worshiped the man.
He said good-by to no one in Mohalis save his landlady. He packed, and it was a simple packing. He stuffed his books, his notes, a shabby suit, his inadequate linen, and his one glory, the dinner clothes, into his unwieldy imitation-leather bag. He remembered with drunken tears the hour of buying the dinner jacket.
Martin’s money, from his father’s tiny estate, came in bimonthly checks from the bank at Elk Mills. He had now but six dollars.
In Zenith he left his bag at the interurban trolley station and sought Clif, whom he found practising eloquence over a beautiful pearl-gray motor hearse, in which a beer-fed undertaker was jovially interested. He waited, sitting hunched and twisted on the steel running-board of a limousine. He resented but he was too listless to resent greatly the stares of the other salesmen and the girl stenographers.
Clif dashed up, bumbling, “Well, well, how’s the boy? Come out and catchum little drink.”
“I could use one.”
Martin knew that Clif was staring at him. As they entered the bar of the Grand Hotel, with its paintings of lovely but absent-minded ladies, its mirrors, its thick marble rail along a mahogany bar, he blurted:
“Well, I got mine, too. Dad Silva’s fired me, for general footlessness. I’m going to bum around a little and then get some kind of a job. God, but I’m tired and nervous! Say, can you lend me some money?”
“You bet. All I’ve got. How much you want?”
“Guess I’ll need a hundred dollars. May drift around quite some time.”
“Golly, I haven’t got that much, but prob’ly I can raise it at the office. Here, sit down at this table and wait for me.”
How Clif obtained the hundred dollars has never been explained, but he was back with it in a quarter-hour. They went on to dinner, and Martin had much too much whisky. Clif took him to his own boarding-house—which was decidedly less promissory of prosperity than Clif’s clothes—firmly gave him a cold bath to bring him to, and put him to bed. Next morning he offered to find a job for him, but Martin refused and left Zenith by the northbound train at noon.
Always, in America, there remains from pioneer days a cheerful pariahdom of shabby young men who prowl causelessly from state to state, from gang to gang, in the power of the Wanderlust. They wear black sateen shirts, and carry bundles. They are not permanently tramps. They have home towns to which they return, to work quietly in the factory or the section-gang for a year—for a week—and as quietly to disappear again. They crowd the smoking cars at night; they sit silent on benches in filthy stations; they know all the land yet of it they know nothing, because in a hundred cities they see only the employment agencies, the all-night lunches, the blind-pigs, the scabrous lodging-houses. Into that world of voyageurs Martin vanished. Drinking steadily, only half-conscious of whither he was going, of what he desired to do, shamefully haunted by Leora and Clif and the swift hands of Gottlieb, he flitted from Zenith to the city of Sparta, across to Ohio, up into Michigan, west to Illinois. His mind was a shambles. He could never quite remember, afterward, where he had been. Once, it is clear, he was soda-fountain clerk in a Minnemagantic drug-store. Once he must have been, for a week, dishwasher in the stench of a cheap restaurant. He wandered by freight trains, on blind baggages, on foot. To his fellow prospectors he was known as “Slim,” the worst-tempered and most restless of all their company.
After a time a sense of direction began to appear in his crazy drifting. He was instinctively headed westward, and to the west, toward the long prairie dusk, Leora was waiting. For a day or two he stopped drinking. He woke up feeling notlike the sickly hobo called “Slim,” but like Martin Arrowsmith, and he pondered, with his mind running clear, “Why shouldn’t I go back? Maybe this hasn’t been so bad for me. I was working too hard. I was pretty high-strung. Blew up. Like to, uh— Wonder what happened to my rabbits?... Will they ever let me do research again?”
But to return to the University before he had seen Leora was impossible. His need of her was an obsession, making the rest of earth absurd and worthless. He had, with blurry cunning, saved most of the hundred dollars he had taken from Clif; he had lived—very badly, on grease-swimming stews and soda-reeking bread—by what he earned along the way. Suddenly, on no particular day, in no particular town in Wisconsin, he stalked to the station, bought a ticket to Wheatsylvania, North Dakota, and telegraphed to Leora, “Coming 2:43 to-morrow Wednesday Sandy.”
He crossed the wide Mississippi into Minnesota. He changed trains at St. Paul; he rolled into gusty vastnesses of snow, cut by thin lines of fence-wire. He felt free, in release from the little fields of Winnemac and Ohio, in relaxation from the shaky nerves of midnight study and midnight booziness. He remembered his days of wire-stringing in Montana and regained that careless peace. Sunset was a surf of crimson, and by night, when he stepped from the choking railroad coach and tramped the platform at Sauk Center, he drank the icy air and looked up to the vast and solitary winter stars. The fan of the Northern Lights frightened and glorified the sky. He returned to the coach with the energy of that courageous land. He nodded and gurgled in brief smothering sleep; he sprawled on the seat and talked with friendly fellow vagrants; he drank bitter coffee and ate enormously of buckwheat cakes at a station restaurant; and so, changing at anonymous towns, he came at last to the squatty shelters, the two wheat-elevators, the cattle-pen, the oil-tank, and the red box of a station with its slushy platform, which composed the outskirts of Wheatsylvania. Against the station, absurd in a huge coonskin coat, stood Leora. He must have looked a little mad as he stared at her from the vestibule, as he shivered with the wind. She lifted to him her two open hands, childishin red mittens. He ran down, he dropped his awkward bag on the platform and, unaware of the gaping furry farmers, they were lost in a kiss.
Years after, in a tropic noon, he remembered the freshness of her wind-cooled cheeks.
The train was gone, pounding out of the tiny station. It had stood like a dark wall beside the platform, protecting them, but now the light from the snowfields glared in on them and left them exposed and self-conscious.
“What—what’s happened?” she fluttered. “No letters. I was so frightened.”
“Off bumming. The dean suspended me—being fresh to profs. D’ y’ care?”
“Course not, if you wanted to—”
“I’ve come to marry you.”
“I don’t see how we can, dearest, but— All right. There’ll be a lovely row with Dad.” She laughed. “He’s always so surprised andhurtwhen anything happens that he didn’t plan out. It’ll be nice to have you with me in the scrap, because you aren’t supposed to know that he expects to plan out everything for everybody and— Oh, Sandy, I’ve been so lonely for you! Mother isn’t really a bit sick, not the least bit, but they go on keeping me here. I think probably somebody hinted to Dad that folks were saying he must be broke, if his dear little daughter had to go off and learn nursing, and he hasn’t worried it all out yet—it takes Andrew Jackson Tozer about a year to worry out anything. Oh, Sandy! You’re here!”
After the clatter and jam of the train, the village seemed blankly empty. He could have walked around the borders of Wheatsylvania in ten minutes. Probably to Leora one building differed from another—she appeared to distinguish between the general store of Norblom and that of Frazier & Lamb—but to Martin the two-story wooden shacks creeping aimlessly along the wide Main Street were featureless and inappreciable. Then “There’s our house, end of the next block,” said Leora, as they turned the corner at the feed and implement store, and in a panic of embarrassment Martin wanted to halt. He saw a storm coming: Mr. Tozer denouncing him as a failure who desired to ruin Leora, Mrs. Tozer weeping.
“Say—say—say—have you told ’em about me?” he stammered.
“Yes. Sort of. I said you were a wonder in medic school, and maybe we’d get married when you finished your internship, and then when your wire came, they wanted to know why you were coming, and why it was you wired from Wisconsin, and what color necktie you had on when you were sending the wire, and I couldn’t make ’em understand I didn’t know. They discussed it. Quite a lot. They do discuss things. All through supper. Solemn. Oh, Sandy, do curse and swear some at meals.”
He was in a funk. Her parents, formerly amusing figures in a story, became oppressively real in sight of the wide, brown, porchy house. A large plate-glass window with a colored border had recently been cut through the wall, as a sign of prosperity, and the garage was new and authoritative.
He tagged after Leora, expecting the blast. Mrs. Tozer opened the door, and stared at him plaintively—a thin, faded, unhumorous woman. She bowed as though he was not so much unwelcome as unexplained and doubtful.
“Will you show Mr. Arrowsmith his room, Ory, or shall I?” she peeped.
It was the kind of house that has a large phonograph but no books, and if there were any pictures, as beyond hope there must have been, Martin never remembered them. The bed in his room was lumpy but covered with a chaste figured spread, and the flowery pitcher and bowl rested on a cover embroidered in red with lambs, frogs, water lilies, and a pious motto.
He took as long as he could in unpacking things which needed no unpacking, and hesitated down the stairs. No one was in the parlor, which smelled of furnace-heat and balsam pillows; then, from nowhere apparent, Mrs. Tozer was there, worrying about him and trying to think of something polite to say.
“Did you have a comfortable trip on the train?”
“Oh, yes, it was— Well, it was pretty crowded.”
“Oh, was it crowded?”
“Yes, there were a lot of people traveling.”
“Were there? I suppose— Yes. Sometimes I wonder where all the people can be going that you see going places all the time. Did you—was it very cold in the Cities—in Minneapolis and St. Paul?”
“Yes, it was pretty cold.”
“Oh, was it cold?”
Mrs. Tozer was so still, so anxiously polite. He felt like a burglar taken for a guest, and intensely he wondered where Leora could be. She came in serenely, with coffee and a tremendous Swedish coffee-ring voluptuous with raisins and glistening brown sugar, and she had them talking, almost easily, about the coldness of winter and the value of Fords when into the midst of all this brightness slid Mr. Andrew Jackson Tozer, and they drooped again to politeness.
Mr. Tozer was as thin and undistinguished and sun-worn as his wife, and like her he peered, he kept silence and fretted. He was astonished by everything in the world that did not bear on his grain elevator, his creamery, his tiny bank, the United Brethren Church, and the careful conduct of an Overland car. It was not astounding that he should have become almost rich, for he accepted nothing that was not natural and convenient to Andrew Jackson Tozer.
He hinted a desire to know whether Martin “drank,” how prosperous he was, and how he could possibly have come all this way from the urbanities of Winnemac. (The Tozers were born in Illinois, but they had been in Dakota since childhood, and they regarded Wisconsin as the farthest, most perilous rim of the Eastern horizon.) They were so blank, so creepily polite, that Martin was able to avoid such unpleasant subjects as being suspended. He dandled an impression that he was an earnest young medic who in no time at all would be making large and suitable sums of money for the support of their Leora, but as he was beginning to lean back in his chair he was betrayed by the appearance of Leora’s brother.
Bert Tozer, Albert R. Tozer, cashier and vice-president of the Wheatsylvania State Bank, auditor and vice-president of the Tozer Grain and Storage Company, treasurer and vice-president of the Star Creamery, was not in the least afflicted by the listening dubiousness of his parents. Bertie was a very articulate and modern man of affairs. He had buck teeth, and on his eye-glasses was a gold chain leading to a dainty hook behind his left ear. He believed in town-boosting, organized motor tours, Boy Scouts, baseball, and the hanging of I. W. W.’s; and his most dolorous regret was that Wheatsylvania was too small—as yet—to have a Y. M. C. A. or a Commercial Club. Plunging in beside him was his fiancée, Miss Ada Quist, daughter of the feed and implement store. Her nose was sharp, butnot so sharp as her voice or the suspiciousness with which she faced Martin.
“This Arrowsmith?” demanded Bert. “Huh! Well, guess you’re glad to be out here in God’s country!”
“Yes, it’s fine—”
“Trouble with the Eastern states is, they haven’t got the git, or the room to grow. You ought to see a real Dakota harvest! Look here, how come you’re away from school this time of year?”
“Why—”
“I know all about school-terms. I went to business college in Grand Forks. How come you can get away now?”
“I took a little lay-off.”
“Leora says you and her are thinking of getting married.”
“We—”
“Got any cash outside your school-money?”
“I have not!”
“Thought so! How juh expect to support a wife?”
“I suppose I’ll be practising medicine some day.”
“Some day! Then what’s the use of talking about being engaged till you can support a wife?”
“That,” interrupted Bert’s lady-love, Miss Ada Quist, “that’s just whatIsaid, Ory!” She seemed to speak with her pointed nose as much as with her button of a mouth. “If Bert and I can wait, I guess other people can!”
Mrs. Tozer whimpered, “Don’t be too hard on Mr. Arrowsmith, Bertie. I’m sure he wants to do the right thing.”
“I’m not being hard on anybody! I’m being sensible. If Pa and you would tend to things instead of standing around fussing, I wouldn’t have to butt in. I don’t believe in interfering with anybody else’s doings, or anybody interfering with mine. Live and let live and mind your own business is my motto, and that’s what I said to Alec Ingleblad the other day when I was in there having a shave and he was trying to get funny about our holding so many mortgages, but I’ll be blamed if I’m going to allow a fellow that I don’t know anything about to come snooping around My Sister till I find out something about his prospects!”
Leora crooned, “Bertie, lamb, your tie is climbing your collar again.”
“Yes andyou, Ory,” shrieked Bert, “if it wasn’t for me you’d have married Sam Petchek, two years ago!”
Bert further said, with instances and illustrations, that she was light-minded, and as for nursing—Nursing!
She said that Bert was what he was, and tried to explain to Martin the matter of Sam Petchek. (It has never yet been altogether explained.)
Ada Quist said that Leora did not care if she broke her dear parents’ hearts and ruined Bert’s career.
Martin said, “Look here, I—” and never got farther.
Mr. and Mrs. Tozer said they were all to be calm, and of course Bert didn’t mean— But really, it was true; they had to be sensible, and how Mr. Arrowsmith could expect to support a wife—
The conference lasted till nine-thirty, which, as Mr. Tozer pointed out, was everybody’s bedtime, and except for the five-minute discussion as to whether Miss Ada Quist was to stay to supper, and the debate on the saltiness of this last cornbeef, they clave faithfully to the inquiry as to whether Martin and Leora were engaged. All persons interested, which apparently did not include Martin and Leora, decided that they were not. Bert ushered Martin upstairs. He saw to it that the lovers should not have a chance for a good-night kiss; and until Mr. Tozer called down the hall, at seven minutes after ten, “You going to stay up and chew the rag the whole blessed night, Bert?” he made himself agreeable by sitting on Martin’s bed, looking derisively at his shabby baggage, and demanding the details of his parentage, religion, politics, and attitude toward the horrors of card-playing and dancing.
At breakfast they all hoped that Martin would stay one more night in their home—plenty of room.
Bert stated that Martin would come down-town at ten and be shown the bank, creamery, and wheat elevator.
But at ten Martin and Leora were on the eastbound train. They got out at the county seat, Leopolis, a vast city of four thousand population, with a three-story building. At one that afternoon they were married, by the German Lutheran pastor. His study was a bareness surrounding a large, rusty wood-stove, and the witnesses, the pastor’s wife and an old German who had been shoveling walks, sat on the wood-box and looked drowsy. Not till they had caught the afternoon train for Wheatsylvania did Martin and Leora escape from the ghostly apprehension which had hunted them all day. In the fetid train, huddled close, hands locked, innocently free of thealienation which the pomposity of weddings sometimes casts between lovers, they sighed, “Now what are we going to do—whatarewe going to do?”
At the Wheatsylvania station they were met by the whole family, rampant.
Bert had suspected elopement. He had searched half a dozen towns by long-distance telephone, and got through to the county clerk just after the license had been granted. It did not soften Bert’s mood to have the clerk remark that if Martin and Leora were of age, there was nothing he could do, and he didn’t “care a damn who’s talking— I’m running this office!”
Bert had come to the station determined to make Martin perfect, even as Bert Tozer was perfect, and to do it right now.
It was a dreadful evening in the Tozer mansion.
Mr. Tozer said, with length, that Martin had undertaken responsibilities.
Mrs. Tozer wept, and said that she hoped Ory had not, for certain reasons,hadto be married—
Bert said that if such was the case, he’d kill Martin—
Ada Quist said that Ory could now see what came of pride and boasting about going off to her old Zenith—
Mr. Tozer said that there was one good thing about it, anyway: Ory could see for herself that they couldn’t let her go back to nursing school and get into more difficulties—
Martin from time to time offered remarks to the effect that he was a good young man, a wonderful bacteriologist, and able to take care ofhiswife; but no one save Leora listened.
Bert further propounded (while his father squeaked, “Now don’t betoohard on the boy,”) that if Martinthoughtfor one singlesecondthat he was going to get one redcentout of the Tozers because he’d gone and buttedinwhere nobody’dinvitedhim, he, Bert, wanted toknowabout it, that was all, he certainly wanted toknowabout it!
And Leora watched them, turning her little head from one to another. Once she came over to press Martin’s hand. In the roughest of the storm, when Martin was beginning to glare, she drew from a mysterious pocket a box of very bad cigarettes, and lighted one. None of the Tozers had discovered that she smoked. Whatever they thought about her sex morals, her infidelity to United Brethrenism, and her general dementia, they had not suspected that she could commit such anobscenity as smoking. They charged on her, and Martin caught his breath savagely.
During these fulminations Mr. Tozer had somehow made up his mind. He could at times take the lead away from Bert, whom he considered useful but slightly indiscreet, and unable to grasp the “full value of a dollar.” (Mr. Tozer valued it at one dollar and ninety, but the progressive Bert at scarce more than one-fifty.) Mr. Tozer mildly gave orders:
They were to stop “scrapping.” They had no proof that Martin was necessarily a bad match for Ory. They would see. Martin would return to medical school at once, and be a good boy and get through as quickly as he could and begin to earn money. Ory would remain at home and behave herself—and she certainly would never act like a Bad Woman again, and smoke cigarettes. Meantime Martin and she would have no, uh, relations. (Mrs. Tozer looked embarrassed, and the hungrily attentive Ada Quist tried to blush.) They could write to each other once a week, but that was all. They would in no way, uh, act as though they were married till he gave permission.
“Well?” he demanded.
Doubtless Martin should have defied them and with his bride in his arms have gone forth into the night. But it seemed only a moment to graduation, to beginning his practise. He had Leora now, forever. For her, he must be sensible. He would return to work, and be Practical. Gottlieb’s ideals of science? Laboratories? Research? Rot!
“All right,” he said.
It did not occur to him that their abstention from love began to-night; it did not come to him till, holding out his hands to Leora, smiling with virtue at having determined to be prudent, he heard Mr. Tozer cackling, “Ory, you go on up to bed now—in your own room!”
That was his bridal night; tossing in his bed, ten yards from her.
Once he heard a door open, and thrilled to her coming. He waited, taut. She did not come. He peeped out, determined to find her room. His deep feeling about his brother-in-law suddenly increased. Bert was parading the hall, on guard. Had Bert been more formidable, Martin might have killed him, but he could not face that buck-toothed and nickering righteousness. He lay and resolved to curse them all in the morning and go off with Leora, but with the coming of the three-o’clock depression he perceived that with him she would probably starve, that he was disgraced, that it was not at all certain he would not become a drunkard.
“Poor kid, I’m not going to spoil her life. God, I do love her! I’m going back, and the way I’m going to work— Can I stand this?”
That was his bridal night and the barren dawn.
Three days later he was walking into the office of Dr. Silva, dean of the Winnemac Medical School.
Dean Silva’ssecretary looked up delightedly, she harkened with anticipation. But Martin said meekly, “Please, could I see the dean?” and meekly he waited, in the row of oak chairs beneath the Dawson Hunziker pharmaceutical calendar.
When he had gone solemnly through the ground-glass door to the dean’s office, he found Dr. Silva glowering. Seated, the little man seemed large, so domed was his head, so full his rounding mustache.
“Well, sir!”
Martin pleaded, “I’d like to come back, if you’ll let me. Honest, I do apologize to you, and I’ll go to Dr. Gottlieb and apologize—though honest, I can’t lay down on Clif Clawson—”
Dr. Silva bounced up from his chair, bristling. Martin braced himself. Wasn’t he welcome? Had he no home, anywhere? He could not fight. He had no more courage. He was so tired after the drab journey, after restraining himself from flaring out at the Tozers. He was so tired! He looked wistfully at the dean.
The little man chuckled, “Never mind, boy. It’s all right! We’re glad you’re back. Bother the apologies! I just wanted you to do whatever’d buck you up. It’s good to have you back! I believed in you, and then I thought perhaps we’d lost you. Clumsy old man!”
Martin was sobbing, too weak for restraint, too lonely and too weak, and Dr. Silva soothed, “Let’s just go over everything and find out where the trouble was. What can I do? Understand, Martin, the thing I want most in life is to help give the world as many good physicians, great healers, as I can. What started your nervousness? Where have you been?”
When Martin came to Leora and his marriage, Silva purred, “I’m delighted! She sounds like a splendid girl. Well, we must try and get you into Zenith General for your internship, a year from now, and make you able to support her properly.”
Martin remembered how often, how astringently, Gottlieb had sneered at “dese merry vedding or jail bells.” He went away Silva’s disciple; he went away to study furiously; and the brilliant insanity of Max Gottlieb’s genius vanished from his faith.
Leora wrote that she had been dropped from the school of nursing for over-absence and for being married. She suspected that it was her father who had informed the hospital authorities. Then, it appeared, she had secretly sent for a shorthand book and, on pretense of helping Bert, she was using the typewriter in the bank, hoping that by next autumn she could join Martin and earn her own living as a stenographer.
Once he offered to give up medicine, to take what work he could find and send for her. She refused.
Though in his service to Leora and to the new god, Dean Silva, he had become austere, denying himself whisky, learning page on page of medicine with a frozen fury, he was always in a vacuum of desire for her, and always he ran the last block to his boarding-house, looking for a letter from her. Suddenly he had a plan. He had tasted shame—this one last shame would not matter. He would flee to her in Easter vacation; he would compel Tozer to support her while she studied stenography in Zenith; he would have her near him through the last year. He paid Clif the borrowed hundred, when the bimonthly check came from Elk Mills, and calculated his finances to the penny. By not buying the suit he distressingly needed, he could manage it. Then for a month and more he had but two meals a day, and of those meals one was bread and butter and coffee. He washed his own linen in the bath-tub and, except for occasional fiercely delightful yieldings, he did not smoke.
His return to Wheatsylvania was like his first flight, except that he talked less with fellow tramps, and all the way, between uneasy naps in the red-plush seats of coaches, he studied the bulky books of gynecology and internal medicine. He had written certain instructions to Leora. He met her on the edge of Wheatsylvania and they had a moment’s talk, a resolute kiss.
News spreads not slowly in Wheatsylvania. There is a certain interest in other people’s affairs, and the eyes of citizens of whose existence Martin did not know had followed him from his arrival. When the culprits reached the bone-littered castle of the Tozer ogres, Leora’s father and brother were already there, and raging. Old Andrew Jackson cried out upon them. He said that conceivably it may not have been insane in Martin to have “run away from school once, but to go and sneak back this second time was absolutely plumb crazy.” Through his tirade, Martin and Leora smiled confidently.
From Bert, “By God, sir, this is too much!” Bert had been reading fiction. “I object to the use of profanity, but when you come and annoy My Sister a second time, all I can say is, by God, sir, this is too blame much!”
Martin looked meditatively out of the window. He noticed three people strolling the muddy street. They all viewed the Tozer house with hopeful interest. Then he spoke steadily:
“Mr. Tozer, I’ve been working hard. Everything has gone fine. But I’ve decided I don’t care to live without my wife. I’ve come to take her back. Legally, you can’t prevent me. I’ll admit, without any argument, I can’t support her yet, if I stay in the University. She’s going to study stenography. She’ll be supporting herself in a few months, and meanwhile I expect you to be decent enough to send her money.”
“Thisistoo much,” said Tozer, and Bert carried it on: “Fellow not only practically ruins a girl but comes and demands that we support her for him!”
“All right. Just as you want. In the long run it’ll be better for her and for me and for you if I finish medic school and have my profession, but if you won’t take care of her, I’ll chuck school, I’ll go to work. Oh, I’ll support her, all right! Only you’ll never see her again. If you go on being idiots, she and I will leave here on the night train for the Coast, and that’ll be the end.” For the first time in his centuries of debate with the Tozers, he was melodramatic. He shook his fist under Bert’s nose. “And if you try to prevent our going, God help you! And the way this town will laugh at you!... How about it, Leora? Are you ready to go away with me—forever?”
“Yes,” she said.
They discussed it, greatly. Tozer and Bert struck attitudes of defense. They couldn’t, they said, be bullied by anybody. Also, Martin was an Adventurer, and how did Leora know hewasn’t planning to live on the money they sent her? In the end they crawled. They decided that this new, mature Martin, this new, hard-eyed Leora were ready to throw away everything for each other.
Mr. Tozer whined a good deal, and promised to send her seventy dollars a month till she should be prepared for office-work.
At the Wheatsylvania station, looking from the train window, Martin realized that this anxious-eyed, lip-puckering Andrew Jackson Tozer did love his daughter, did mourn her going.
He found for Leora a room on the frayed northern edge of Zenith, miles nearer Mohalis and the University than her hospital had been; a square white and blue room, with blotchy but shoulder-wise chairs. It looked out on breezy, stubbly waste land reaching to distant glittering railroad tracks. The landlady was a round German woman with an eye for romance. It is doubtful if she ever believed that they were married. She was a good woman.
Leora’s trunk had come. Her stenography books were primly set out on her little table and her pink felt slippers were arranged beneath the white iron bed. Martin stood with her at the window, mad with the pride of proprietorship. Suddenly he was so weak, so tired, that the mysterious cement which holds cell to cell seemed dissolved, and he felt that he was collapsing. But with knees rigidly straightening, his head back, his lips tight across his teeth, he caught himself, and cried, “Our first home!”
That he should be with her, quiet, none disturbing, was intoxication.
The commonplace room shone with peculiar light; the vigorous weeds and rough grass of the waste land were radiant under the April sun, and sparrows were cheeping.
“Yes,” said Leora, with voice, then hungry lips.
Leora attended the Zenith University of Business Administration and Finance, which title indicated that it was a largeand quite reasonably bad school for stenographers, bookkeepers, and such sons of Zenith brewers and politicians as were unable to enter even state universities. She trotted daily to the car-line, a neat, childish figure with note-books and sharpened pencils, to vanish in the horde of students. It was six months before she had learned enough stenography to obtain a place in an insurance office.
Till Martin graduated they kept that room, their home, ever dearer. No one was so domestic as these birds of passage. At least two evenings a week Martin dashed in from Mohalis and studied there. She had a genius for keeping out of his way, for not demanding to be noticed, so that, while he plunged into his books as he never had done in Clif’s rustling, grunting, expectorating company, he had ever the warm, half-conscious feeling of her presence. Sometimes, at midnight, just as he began to realize that he was hungry, he would find that a plate of sandwiches had by silent magic appeared at his elbow. He was none the less affectionate because he did not comment. She made him secure. She shut out the world that had pounded at him.
On their walks, at dinner, in the dissolute and deliciously wasteful quarter-hour when they sat on the edge of the bed with comforters wrapped about them and smoked an inexcusable cigarette before breakfast, he explained his work to her, and when her own studying was done, she tried to read whichever of his books was not in use. Knowing nothing, never learning much, of the actual details of medicine, yet she understood—better it may be than Angus Duer—his philosophy and the basis of his work. If he had given up Gottlieb-worship and his yearning for the laboratory as for a sanctuary, if he had resolved to be a practical and wealth-mastering doctor, yet something of Gottlieb’s spirit remained. He wanted to look behind details and impressive-sounding lists of technical terms for the causes of things, for general rules which might reduce the chaos of dissimilar and contradictory symptoms to the orderliness of chemistry.
Saturday evening they went solemnly to the motion pictures—one and two-reel films with Cowboy Billy Anderson and a girl later to be famous as Mary Pickford—and solemnly they discussed the non-existent plots as they returned, unconscious of other people on the streets; but when they walked into the country on a Sunday (with four sandwiches and a bottle ofginger ale in his threadbare pockets), he chased her up-hill and down-gully, and they lost their solemnity in joyous childishness. He intended, when he came to her room in the evening, to catch the owl-car to Mohalis and be near his work when he woke in the morning. He was resolute about it, always, and she admired his efficiency, but he never caught the car. The crew of the six o’clock morning interurban became used to a pale, quick-moving young man who sat hunched in a back seat, devouring large red books, absently gnawing a rather dreadful doughnut. But in this young man there was none of the heaviness of workers dragged out of bed at dawn for another gray and futile day of labor. He appeared curiously determined, curiously content.
It was all so much easier, now that he was partly freed from the tyrannical honesty of Gottliebism, from the unswerving quest for causes which, as it drove through layer below layer, seemed ever farther from the bottommost principles, from the intolerable strain of learning day by day how much he did not know. It warmed him to escape from Gottlieb’s ice-box into Dean Silva’s neighborly world.
Now and then he saw Gottlieb on the campus. They bowed in embarrassment and passed in haste.