Allafternoon they drove in the flapping buggy across the long undulations of the prairie. To their wandering there was no barrier, neither lake nor mountain nor factory-bristling city, and the breeze about them was flowing sunshine.
Martin cried to Leora, “I feel as if all the Zenith dust and hospital lint were washed out of my lungs. Dakota. Real man’s country. Frontier. Opportunity. America!”
From the thick swale the young prairie chickens rose. As he watched them sweep across the wheat, his sun-drowsed spirit was part of the great land, and he was almost freed of the impatience with which he had started out from Wheatsylvania.
“If you’re going driving, don’t forget that supper is six o’clock, sharp,” Mrs. Tozer had said, smiling to sugar-coat it.
On Main Street, Mr. Tozer waved to them and shouted, “Be back by six. Supper at six o’clock sharp.”
Bert Tozer ran out from the bank, like a country schoolmaster skipping from a one-room schoolhouse, and cackled, “Say, you folks better not forget to be back at six o’clock for supper or the Old Man’ll have a fit. He’ll expect you for supper at six o’clock sharp, and when he says six o’clocksharp, he means six o’clocksharp, and not five minutespastsix!”
“Now that,” observed Leora, “is funny, because in my twenty-two years in Wheatsylvania I remember three different times when supper was as late as seven minutes after six. Let’s get out of this, Sandy.... I wonder were we so wise to live with the family and save money?”
Before they had escaped from the not very extensive limits of Wheatsylvania they passed Ada Quist, the future Mrs. Bert Tozer, and through the lazy air they heard her voice slashing: “Better be home by six.”
Martin would be heroic. “We’ll by golly get back when we’re by golly good and ready!” he said to Leora; but on them both was the cumulative dread of the fussing voices, beyond every breezy prospect was the order, “Be back at six sharp”; and they whipped up to arrive at eleven minutes to six, as Mr. Tozer wasreturning from the creamery, full thirty seconds later than usual.
“Glad to see you among us,” he said. “Hustle now and get that horse in the livery stable. Supper’s at six—sharp!”
Martin survived it sufficiently to sound domestic when he announced at the supper-table:
“We had a bully drive. I’m going to like it here. Well, I’ve loafed for a day and a half, and now I’ve got to get busy. First thing is, I must find a location for my office. What is there vacant, Father Tozer?”
Mrs. Tozer said brightly, “Oh, I have such a nice idea, Martin. Why can’t we fix up an office for you out in the barn? It’d be so handy to the house, for you to get to meals on time, and you could keep an eye on the house if the girl was out and Ory and I went out visiting or to the Embroidery Circle.”
“In the barn!”
“Why, yes, in the old harness room. It’s partly ceiled, and we could put in some nice tar paper or even beaver board.”
“Mother Tozer, what the dickens do you think I’m planning to do? I’m not a hired man in a livery stable, or a kid looking for a place to put his birds’ eggs! I was thinking of opening an office as a physician!”
Bert made it all easy: “Yuh, but you aren’t much of a physician yet. You’re just getting your toes in.”
“I’m one hell of a good physician! Excuse me for cussing, Mother Tozer, but— Why, nights in the hospital, I’ve held hundreds of lives in my hand! I intend—”
“Look here, Mart,” said Bertie. “As we’re putting up the money— I don’t want to be a tightwad but after all, a dollar is a dollar—if we furnish the dough, we’ve got to decide the best way to spend it.”
Mr. Tozer looked thoughtful and said helplessly, “That’s so. No sense taking a risk, with the blame’ farmers demanding all the money they can get for their wheat and cream, and then deliberately going to work and not paying the interest on their loans. I swear, it don’t hardly pay to invest in mortgages any longer. No sense putting on lugs. Stands to reason you can look at a fellow’s sore throat or prescribe for an ear-ache just as well in a nice simple little office as in some fool place all fixed up like a Moorhead saloon. Mother will see you have a comfortable corner in the barn—”
Leora intruded: “Look here, Papa. I want you to lend us one thousand dollars, outright, to use as we see fit.” The sensation was immense. “We’ll pay you six per cent—no, we won’t; we’ll pay you five; that’s enough.”
“And mortgages bringing six, seven, and eight!” Bert quavered.
“Five’s enough. And we want our own say, absolute, as to how we use it—to fit up an office or anything else.”
Mr. Tozer began, “That’s a foolish way to—”
Bert took it away from him: “Ory, you’re crazy! I suppose we’ll have to lend you some money, but you’ll blame well come to us for it from time to time, and you’ll blame well take our advice—”
Leora rose. “Either you do what I say, just exactly what I say, or Mart and I take the first train and go back to Zenith, and I mean it! Plenty of places open for him there, with a big salary, so we won’t have to be dependent on anybody!”
There was much conversation, most of which sounded like all the rest of it. Once Leora started for the stairs, to go up and pack; once Martin and she stood waving their napkins as they shook their fists, the general composition remarkably like the Laocoön.
Leora won.
They settled down to the most solacing fussing.
“Did you bring your trunk up from the depot?” asked Mr. Tozer.
“No sense leaving it there—paying two bits a day storage!” fumed Bert.
“I got it up this morning,” said Martin.
“Oh, yes, Martin had it brought up this morning,” agreed Mrs. Tozer.
“You had it brought? Didn’t you bring it up yourself?” agonized Mr. Tozer.
“No. I had the fellow that runs the lumberyard haul it up for me,” said Martin.
“Well, gosh almighty, you could just as well’ve put it on a wheelbarrow and brought it up yourself and saved a quarter!” said Bert.
“But a doctor has to keep his dignity,” said Leora.
“Dignity, rats! Blame sight more dignified to be seen shoving a wheelbarrow than smoking them dirty cigarettes all the time!”
“Well, anyway— Where’d you put it?” asked Mr. Tozer.
“It’s up in our room,” said Martin.
“Where’d you think we better put it when it’s unpacked? The attic is awful’ full,” Mr. Tozer submitted to Mrs. Tozer.
“Oh, I think Martin could get it in there.”
“Why couldn’t he put it in the barn?”
“Oh, not a nice new trunk like that!”
“What’s the matter with the barn?” said Bert. “It’s all nice and dry. Seems a shame to waste all that good space in the barn, now that you’ve gone and decided he mustn’t have his dear little office there!”
“Bertie,” from Leora, “I know what we’ll do. You seem to have the barn on your brain. You move your old bank there, and Martin’ll take the bank building for his office.”
“That’s entirely different—”
“Now there’s no sense you two showing off and trying to be smart,” protested Mr. Tozer. “Do you ever hear your mother and I scrapping and fussing like that? When do you think you’ll have your trunk unpacked, Mart?” Mr. Tozer could consider barns and he could consider trunks but his was not a brain to grasp two such complicated matters at the same time.
“I can get it unpacked to-night, if it makes any difference—”
“Well, I don’t suppose it really makes any special difference, but when you start todoa thing—”
“Oh, what difference does it make whether he—”
“If he’s going to look for an office, instead of moving right into the barn, he can’t take a month of Sundays getting unpacked and—”
“Oh, good Lord, I’ll get it done to-night—”
“And I think we can get it in the attic—”
“I tell you it’s jam full already—”
“We’ll go take a look at it after supper—”
“Well now, I tell you when I tried to get that duck-boat in—”
Martin probably did not scream, but he heard himself screaming. The free and virile land was leagues away and for years forgotten.
To find an office took a fortnight of diplomacy, and of discussion brightening three meals a day, every day. (Not that office-finding was the only thing the Tozers mentioned. Theywent thoroughly into every moment of Martin’s day; they commented on his digestion, his mail, his walks, his shoes that needed cobbling, and whether he had yet taken them to the farmer-trapper-cobbler, and how much the cobbling ought to cost, and the presumable theology, politics, and marital relations of the cobbler.)
Mr. Tozer had from the first known the perfect office. The Norbloms lived above their general store, and Mr. Tozer knew that the Norbloms were thinking of moving. There was indeed nothing that was happening or likely to happen in Wheatsylvania which Mr. Tozer did not know and explain. Mrs. Norblom was tired of keeping house, and she wanted to go to Mrs. Beeson’s boarding house (to the front room, on the right as you went along the up-stairs hall, the room with the plaster walls and the nice little stove that Mrs. Beeson bought from Otto Krag for seven dollars and thirty-five cents—no, seven and a quarter it was).
They called on the Norbloms and Mr. Tozer hinted that “it might be nice for the Doctor to locate over the store, if the Norbloms were thinking of making any change—”
The Norbloms stared at each other, with long, bleached, cautious, Scandinavian stares, and grumbled that they “didn’tknow—of course it was the finest location in town—” Mr. Norblom admitted that if, against all probability, they ever considered moving, they would probably ask twenty-five dollars a month for the flat, unfurnished.
Mr. Tozer came out of the international conference as craftily joyful as any Mr. Secretary Tozer or Lord Tozer in Washington or London:
“Fine! Fine! We made him commit himself! Twenty-five, he says. That means, when the time’s ripe, we’ll offer him eighteen and close for twenty-one-seventy-five. If we just handle him careful, and give him time to go see Mrs. Beeson and fix up about boarding with her, we’ll have him just where we want him!”
“Oh, if the Norbloms can’t make up their minds, then let’s try something else,” said Martin. “There’s a couple of vacant rooms behind theEagleoffice.”
“What? Go chasing around, after we’ve given the Norbloms reason to think we’re serious, and make enemies of ’em for life? Now that would be a fine way to start building up a practise, wouldn’t it! And I must say I wouldn’t blame the Norblomsone bit for getting wild if you let ’em down like that. This ain’t Zenith, where you can go yelling around expecting to get things done in two minutes!”
Through a fortnight, while the Norbloms agonized over deciding to do what they had long ago decided to do, Martin waited, unable to begin work. Until he should open a certified and recognizable office, most of the village did not regard him as a competent physician but as “that son-in-law of Andy Tozer’s.” In the fortnight he was called only once: for the sick-headache of Miss Agnes Ingleblad, aunt and housekeeper of Alec Ingleblad the barber. He was delighted, till Bert Tozer explained:
“Oh, soshecalled you in, eh? She’s always doctorin’ around. There ain’t a thing the matter with her, but she’s always trying out the latest stunt. Last time it was a fellow that come through here selling pills and liniments out of a Ford, and the time before that it was a faith-healer, crazy loon up here at Dutchman’s Forge, and then for quite a spell she doctored with an osteopath in Leopolis—though I tell you there’s something to this osteopathy—they cure a lot of folks that you regular docs can’t seem to find out what’s the matter with ’em, don’t you think so?”
Martin remarked that he did not think so.
“Oh, you docs!” Bert crowed in his most jocund manner, for Bert could be very joky and bright. “You’re all alike, especially when you’re just out of school and think you know it all. You can’t see any good in chiropractic or electric belts or bone-setters or anything, because they take so many good dollars away from you.”
Then behold the Dr. Martin Arrowsmith who had once infuriated Angus Duer and Irving Watters by his sarcasm on medical standards upholding to a lewdly grinning Bert Tozer the benevolence and scientific knowledge of all doctors; proclaiming that no medicine had ever (at least by any Winnemac graduate) been prescribed in vain nor any operation needlessly performed.
He saw a good deal of Bert now. He sat about the bank, hoping to be called on a case, his fingers itching for bandages. Ada Quist came in with frequency and Bert laid aside his figuring to be coy with her:
“You got to be careful what you even think about, when the doc is here, Ade. He’s been telling me what a whale of a lot of neurology and all that mind-reading stuff he knows. Howabout it, Mart? I’m getting so scared that I’ve changed the combination on the safe.”
“Heh!” said Ada. “He may fool some folks but he can’t fool me. Anybody can learn things in books, but when it comes to practising ’em— Let me tell you, Mart, if you ever have one-tenth of the savvy that old Dr. Winter of Leopolis has, you’ll live longer than I expect!”
Together they pointed out that for a person who felt his Zenith training had made him so “gosh-awful’ smart that he sticks up his nose at us poor hicks of dirt-farmers,” Martin’s scarf was rather badly tied.
All of his own wit and some of Ada’s Bert repeated at the supper table.
“You oughtn’t to ride the boy so hard. Still, that was pretty cute about the necktie— I guess Mart does think he’s some punkins,” chuckled Mr. Tozer.
Leora took Martin aside after supper. “Darlin’, can you stand it? We’ll have our own house, soon as we can. Or shall we vamoose?”
“I’m by golly going to stand it!”
“Um. Maybe. Dear, when you hit Bertie, do be careful—they’ll hang you.”
He ambled to the front porch. He determined to view the rooms behind theEagleoffice. Without a retreat in which to be safe from Bert he could not endure another week. He could not wait for the Norbloms to make up their minds, though they had become to him dread and eternal figures whose enmity would crush him; prodigious gods shadowing this Wheatsylvania which was the only perceptible world.
He was aware, in the late sad light, that a man was tramping the plank walk before the house, hesitating and peering at him. The man was one Wise, a Russian Jew known to the village as “Wise the Polack.” In his shack near the railroad he sold silver stock and motor-factory stock, bought and sold farmlands and horses and muskrat hides. He called out, “That you, Doc?”
“Yup!”
Martin was excited. A patient!
“Say, I wish you’d walk down a ways with me. Couple things I’d like to talk to you about. Or say, come on over to my place and sample some new cigars I’ve got.” He emphasizedthe word “cigars.” North Dakota was, like Mohalis, theoretically dry.
Martin was pleased. He had been sober and industrious so long now!
Wise’s shack was a one-story structure, not badly built, half a block from Main Street, with nothing but the railroad track between it and open wheat country. It was lined with pine, pleasant-smelling under the stench of old pipe-smoke. Wise winked—he was a confidential, untrustworthy wisp of a man—and murmured, “Think you could stand a little jolt of first-class Kentucky bourbon?”
“Well, I wouldn’t get violent about it.”
Wise pulled down the sleazy window-shades and from a warped drawer of his desk brought up a bottle out of which they both drank, wiping the mouth of the bottle with circling palms. Then Wise, abruptly:
“Look here, Doc. You’re not like these hicks; you understand that sometimes a fellow gets mixed up in crooked business he didn’t intend to. Well, make a long story short, I guess I’ve sold too much mining stock, and they’ll be coming down on me. I’ve got to be moving—curse it—hoped I could stay settled for couple of years, this time. Well, I hear you’re looking for an office. This place would be ideal. Ideal! Two rooms at the back besides this one. I’ll rent it to you, furniture and the whole shooting-match, for fifteen dollars a month, if you’ll pay me one year in advance. Oh, this ain’t phony. Your brother-in-law knows all about my ownership.”
Martin tried to be very business-like. Was he not a young doctor who would soon be investing money, one of the most Substantial Citizens in Wheatsylvania? He returned home, and under the parlor lamp, with its green daisies on pink glass, the Tozers listened acutely, Bert stooping forward with open mouth.
“You’d be safe renting it for a year, but that ain’t the point,” said Bert.
“It certainly isn’t! Antagonize the Norbloms, now that they’ve almost made up their minds to let you have their place? Make me a fool, after all the trouble I’ve taken?” groaned Mr. Tozer.
They went over it and over it till almost ten o’clock, but Martin was resolute, and the next day he rented Wise’s shack.
For the first time in his life he had a place utterly his own, his and Leora’s.
In his pride of possession this was the most lordly building on earth, and every rock and weed and doorknob was peculiar and lovely. At sunset he sat on the back stoop (a very interesting and not too broken soap-box) and from the flamboyant horizon the open country flowed across the thin band of the railroad to his feet. Suddenly Leora was beside him, her arm round his neck, and he hymned all the glory of their future:
“Know what I found in the kitchen here? A dandy old auger, hardly rustya bit, and I can take a box and make a test-tube rack ... of my own!”
Withnone of the profane observations on “medical pedlers” which had annoyed Digamma Pi, Martin studied the catalogue of the New Idea Instrument and Furniture Company, of Jersey City. It was a handsome thing. On the glossy green cover, in red and black, were the portraits of the president, a round quippish man who loved all young physicians; the general manager, a cadaverous scholarly man who surely gave all his laborious nights and days to the advancement of science; and the vice-president, Martin’s former preceptor, Dr. Roscoe Geake, who had a lively, eye-glassed, forward-looking modernity all his own. The cover also contained, in surprisingly small space, a quantity of poetic prose, and the inspiring promise:
Doctor, don’t be buffaloed by the unenterprising. No reason why YOU should lack the equipment which impresses patients, makes practise easy, and brings honor and riches. All the high-class supplies which distinguish the Leaders of the Profession from the Dubs are within YOUR reach right NOW by the famous New Idea Financial System: ‘Just a little down and the rest FREE—out of the increased earnings which New Idea apparatus will bring you!”
Doctor, don’t be buffaloed by the unenterprising. No reason why YOU should lack the equipment which impresses patients, makes practise easy, and brings honor and riches. All the high-class supplies which distinguish the Leaders of the Profession from the Dubs are within YOUR reach right NOW by the famous New Idea Financial System: ‘Just a little down and the rest FREE—out of the increased earnings which New Idea apparatus will bring you!”
Above, in a border of laurel wreaths and Ionic capitals, was the challenge:
Sing not the glory of soldiers or explorers or statesmen for who can touch the doctor—wise, heroic, uncontaminated by common greed. Gentlemen, we salute you humbly and herewith offer you the most up-to-the-jiffy catalogue ever presented by any surgical supply house.
Sing not the glory of soldiers or explorers or statesmen for who can touch the doctor—wise, heroic, uncontaminated by common greed. Gentlemen, we salute you humbly and herewith offer you the most up-to-the-jiffy catalogue ever presented by any surgical supply house.
The back cover, though it was less glorious with green and red, was equally arousing. It presented illustrations of the Bindledorf Tonsillectomy Outfit and of an electric cabinet, with the demand:
Doctor, are you sending your patients off to specialists for tonsil removal or to sanitoriums for electric, etc., treatment? If so, you are losing the chance to show yourself one of the distinguishedpowers in the domain of medical advancement in your locality, and losing a lot of big fees. Don’t you WANT to be a high-class practitioner? Here’s the Open Door.The Bindledorf Outfit is not only useful but exquisitely beautiful, adorns and gives class to any office. We guarantee that by the installation of a Bindledorf Outfit and a New Idea Panaceatic Electro-Therapeutic Cabinet (see details on pp. 34 and 97) you can increase your income from a thousand to ten thousand annually and please patients more than by the most painstaking plugging.When the Great Call sounds, Doctor, and it’s time for you to face your reward, will you be satisfied by a big Masonic funeral and tributes from Grateful Patients if you have failed to lay up provision for the kiddies, and faithful wife who has shared your tribulations?You may drive through blizzard and August heat, and go down into the purple-shadowed vale of sorrow and wrestle with the ebon-cloaked Powers of Darkness for the lives of your patients, but that heroism is incomplete without Modern Progress, to be obtained by the use of a Bindledorf Tonsillectomy Outfit and the New Idea Panaceatic Cabinet, to be obtained on small payment down, rest on easiest terms known in history of medicine!
Doctor, are you sending your patients off to specialists for tonsil removal or to sanitoriums for electric, etc., treatment? If so, you are losing the chance to show yourself one of the distinguishedpowers in the domain of medical advancement in your locality, and losing a lot of big fees. Don’t you WANT to be a high-class practitioner? Here’s the Open Door.
The Bindledorf Outfit is not only useful but exquisitely beautiful, adorns and gives class to any office. We guarantee that by the installation of a Bindledorf Outfit and a New Idea Panaceatic Electro-Therapeutic Cabinet (see details on pp. 34 and 97) you can increase your income from a thousand to ten thousand annually and please patients more than by the most painstaking plugging.
When the Great Call sounds, Doctor, and it’s time for you to face your reward, will you be satisfied by a big Masonic funeral and tributes from Grateful Patients if you have failed to lay up provision for the kiddies, and faithful wife who has shared your tribulations?
You may drive through blizzard and August heat, and go down into the purple-shadowed vale of sorrow and wrestle with the ebon-cloaked Powers of Darkness for the lives of your patients, but that heroism is incomplete without Modern Progress, to be obtained by the use of a Bindledorf Tonsillectomy Outfit and the New Idea Panaceatic Cabinet, to be obtained on small payment down, rest on easiest terms known in history of medicine!
This poetry of passion Martin neglected, for his opinion of poetry was like his opinion of electric cabinets, but excitedly he ordered a steel stand, a sterilizer, flasks, test-tubes, and a white-enameled mechanism with enchanting levers and gears which transformed it from examining-chair to operating-table. He yearned over the picture of a centrifuge while Leora was admiring the “stunning seven-piece Reception Room fumed oak set, upholstered in genuine Barcelona Longware Leatherette, will give your office the class and distinction of any high-grade New York specialist’s.”
“Aw, let ’em sit on plain chairs,” Martin grunted.
In the attic Mrs. Tozer found enough seedy chairs for the reception-room, and an ancient bookcase which, when Leora had lined it with pink fringed paper, became a noble instrument-cabinet. Till the examining-chair should arrive, Martin would use Wise’s lumpy couch, and Leora busily covered it with white oilcloth. Behind the front room of the tiny office-building were two cubicles, formerly bedroom and kitchen. Martin made them into consultation-room and laboratory. Whistling, he sawed out racks for the glassware and turned the oven of a discarded kerosene stove into a hot-air oven for sterilizing glassware.
“But understand, Lee, I’m not going to go monkeying with any scientific research. I’m through with all that.”
Leora smiled innocently. While he worked she sat outside in the long wild grass, sniffing the prairie breeze, her hands about her ankles, but every quarter-hour she had to come in and admire.
Mr. Tozer brought home a package at suppertime. The family opened it, babbling. After supper Martin and Leora hastened with the new treasure to the office and nailed it in place. It was a plate-glass sign; on it in gold letters, “M. Arrowsmith, M.D.” They looked up, arms about each other, squealing softly, and in reverence he grunted, “There—by—jiminy!”
They sat on the back stoop, exulting in freedom from Tozers. Along the railroad bumped a freight train with a cheerful clanking. The fireman waved to them from the engine, a brakeman from the platform of the red caboose. After the train there was silence but for the crickets and a distant frog.
“I’ve never been so happy,” he murmured.
He had brought from Zenith his own Ochsner surgical case. As he laid out the instruments he admired the thin, sharp, shining bistoury, the strong tenotome, the delicate curved needles. With them was a dental forceps. Dad Silva had warned his classes, “Don’t forget the country doctor often has to be not only physician but dentist, yes, and priest, divorce lawyer, blacksmith, chauffeur, and road engineer, and if you are too lily-handed for those trades, don’t get out of sight of a trolley line and a beauty parlor.” And the first patient whom Martin had in the new office, the second patient in Wheatsylvania, was Nils Krag, the carpenter, roaring with an ulcerated tooth. This was a week before the glass sign was up, and Martin rejoiced to Leora, “Begun already! You’ll see ’em tumbling in now.”
They did not see them tumbling in. For ten days Martin tinkered at his hot-air oven or sat at his desk, reading and trying to look busy. His first joy passed into fretfulness, and he could have yelped at the stillness, the inactivity.
Late one afternoon, when he was in a melancholy way preparing to go home, into the office stamped a grizzled Swedishfarmer who grumbled, “Doc, I got a fish-hook caught in my thumb and it’s all swole.” To Arrowsmith, intern in Zenith General Hospital with its out-patient clinic treating hundreds a day, the dressing of a hand had been less important than borrowing a match, but to Dr. Arrowsmith of Wheatsylvania it was a hectic operation, and the farmer a person remarkable and very charming. Martin shook his left hand violently and burbled, “Now if there’s anything, you just ’phone me—you just ’phone me.”
There had been, he felt, a rush of admiring patients sufficient to justify them in the one thing Leora and he longed to do, the thing about which they whispered at night: the purchase of a motor car for his country calls.
They had seen the car at Frazier’s store.
It was a Ford, five years old, with torn upholstery, a gummy motor, and springs made by a blacksmith who had never made springs before. Next to the chugging of the gas engine at the creamery, the most familiar sound in Wheatsylvania was Frazier’s closing the door of his Ford. He banged it flatly at the store, and usually he had to shut it thrice again before he reached home.
But to Martin and Leora, when they had tremblingly bought the car and three new tires and a horn, it was the most impressive vehicle on earth. It was their own; they could go when and where they wished.
During his summer at a Canadian hotel Martin had learned to drive the Ford station wagon, but it was Leora’s first venture. Bert had given her so many directions that she had refused to drive the family Overland. When she first sat at the steering wheel, when she moved the hand-throttle with her little finger and felt in her own hands all this power, sorcery enabling her to go as fast as she might desire (within distinct limits), she transcended human strength, she felt that she could fly like the wild goose—and then in a stretch of sand she killed the engine.
Martin became the demon driver of the village. To ride with him was to sit holding your hat, your eyes closed, waiting for death. Apparently he accelerated for corners, to make them more interesting. The sight of anything on the road ahead, from another motor to a yellow pup, stirred in him a frenzy which could be stilled only by going up and passing it. The village adored, “The Young Doc is quite some driver, all right.” They waited, with amiable interest, to hear that he had been killed. It is possible that half of the first dozen patients who drifted into his office came because of awe at his driving ... the rest because there was nothing serious the matter, and he was nearer than Dr. Hesselink at Groningen.
With his first admirers he developed his first enemies.
When he met the Norbloms on the street (and in Wheatsylvania it is difficult not to meet every one on the street every day), they glared. Then he antagonized Pete Yeska.
Pete conducted what he called a “drug store,” devoted to the sale of candy, soda water, patent medicines, fly paper, magazines, washing-machines, and Ford accessories, yet Pete would have starved if he had not been postmaster also. He alleged that he was a licensed pharmacist but he so mangled prescriptions that Martin burst into the store and addressed him piously.
“You young docs make me sick,” said Pete. “I was putting up prescriptions when you was in the cradle. The old doc that used to be here sent everything to me. My way o’ doing things suits me, and I don’t figure on changing it for you or any other half-baked young string-bean.”
Thereafter Martin had to purchase drugs from St. Paul, overcrowd his tiny laboratory, and prepare his own pills and ointments, looking in a homesick way at the rarely used test-tubes and the dust gathering on the bell glass of his microscope, while Pete Yeska joined with the Norbloms in whispering, “This new doc here ain’t any good. You better stick to Hesselink.”
So blank, so idle, had been the week that when he heard the telephone at the Tozers’, at three in the morning, he rushed to it as though he were awaiting a love message.
A hoarse and shaky voice: “I want to speak to the doctor.”
“Yuh—yuh— ’S the doctor speaking.”
“This is Henry Novak, four miles northeast, on the Leopolis road. My little girl, Mary, she has a terrible sore throat. Ithink maybe it is croup and she look awful and— Could you come right away?”
“You bet. Be right there.”
Four miles—he would do it in eight minutes.
He dressed swiftly, dragging his worn brown tie together, while Leora beamed over the first night call. He furiously cranked the Ford, banged and clattered past the station and into the wheat prairie. When he had gone six miles by the speedometer, slackening at each rural box to look for the owner’s name, he realized that he was lost. He ran into a farm driveway and stopped under the willows, his headlight on a heap of dented milk-cans, broken harvester wheels, cordwood, and bamboo fishing-poles. From the barn dashed a woolly anomalous dog, barking viciously, leaping up at the car.
A frowsy head protruded from a ground-floor window. “What you want?” screamed a Scandinavian voice.
“This is The Doctor. Where does Henry Novak live?”
“Oh! The Doctor! Dr. Hesselink?”
“No! Dr. Arrowsmith.”
“Oh. Dr. Arrowsmith. From Wheatsylvania? Um. Well, you went right near his place. You yoost turn back one mile and turn to the right by the brick schoolhouse, and it’s about forty rods up the road—the house with a cement silo. Somebody sick by Henry’s?”
“Yuh—yuh—girl’s got croup—thanks—”
“Yoost keep to the right. You can’t miss it.”
Probably no one who has listened to the dire “you can’t miss it” has ever failed to miss it.
Martin swung the Ford about, grazing a slashed chopping-block; he rattled up the road, took the corner that side of the schoolhouse instead of this, ran half a mile along a boggy trail between pastures, and stopped at a farmhouse. In the surprising fall of silence, cows were to be heard feeding, and a white horse, startled in the darkness, raised its head to wonder at him. He had to arouse the house with wild squawkings of his horn, and an irate farmer who bellowed, “Who’s there? I’ve got a shotgun!” sent him back to the country road.
It was forty minutes from the time of the telephone call when he rushed into a furrowed driveway and saw on the doorstep, against the lamplight, a stooped man who called, “The Doctor? This is Novak.”
He found the child in a newly finished bedroom of white plastered walls and pale varnished pine. Only an iron bed, a straight chair, a chromo of St. Anne, and a shadeless hand-lamp on a rickety stand broke the staring shininess of the apartment, a recent extension of the farmhouse. A heavy-shouldered woman was kneeling by the bed. As she lifted her wet red face, Novak urged:
“Don’t cry now; he’s here!” And to Martin: “The little one is pretty bad but we done all we could for her. Last night and to-night we steam her throat, and we put her here in our own bedroom!”
Mary was a child of seven or eight. Martin found her lips and finger-tips blue, but in her face no flush. In the effort to expel her breath she writhed into terrifying knots, then coughed up saliva dotted with grayish specks. Martin worried as he took out his clinical thermometer and gave it a professional-looking shake.
It was, he decided, laryngeal croup or diphtheria. Probably diphtheria. No time now for bacteriological examination, for cultures and leisurely precision. Silva the healer bulked in the room, crowding out Gottlieb the inhuman perfectionist. Martin leaned nervously over the child on the tousled bed, absent-mindedly trying her pulse again and again. He felt helpless without the equipment of Zenith General, its nurses and Angus Duer’s sure advice. He had a sudden respect for the lone country doctor.
He had to make a decision, irrevocable, perhaps perilous. He would use diphtheria antitoxin. But certainly he could not obtain it from Pete Yeska’s in Wheatsylvania.
Leopolis?
“Hustle up and get me Blassner, the druggist at Leopolis, on the ’phone,” he said to Novak, as calmly as he could contrive. He pictured Blassner driving through the night, respectfully bringing the antitoxin to The Doctor. While Novak bellowed into the farm-line telephone, in the dining-room, Martin waited—waited—staring at the child; Mrs. Novak waited for him to do miracles; the child’s tossing and hoarse gasping became horrible; and the glaring walls, the glaring lines of pale yellow woodwork, hypnotized him into sleepiness. It was too late for anything short of antitoxin or tracheotomy. Should he operate; cut into the wind-pipe that she might breathe? He stood and worried; he drowned in sleepiness and shook himself awake. He had to do something, with the mother kneeling there, gaping at him, beginning to look doubtful.
“Get some hot cloths—towels, napkins—and keep ’em around her neck. I wish to God he’d get that telephone call!” he fretted.
As Mrs. Novak, padding on thick slippered feet, brought in the hot cloths, Novak appeared with a blank “Nobody sleeping at the drug store, and Blassner’s house-line is out of order.”
“Then listen. I’m afraid this may be serious. I’ve got to have antitoxin. Going to drive t’ Leopolis and get it. You keep up these hot applications and— Wish we had an atomizer. And room ought to be moister. Got ’n alcohol stove? Keep some water boiling in here. No use of medicine. B’ right back.”
He drove the twenty-four miles to Leopolis in thirty-seven minutes. Not once did he slow down for a cross-road. He defied the curves, the roots thrusting out into the road, though always one dark spot in his mind feared a blow-out and a swerve. The speed, the casting away of all caution, wrought in him a high exultation, and it was blessed to be in the cool air and alone, after the strain of Mrs. Novak’s watching. In his mind all the while was the page in Osler regarding diphtheria, the very picture of the words: “In severe cases the first dose should be from 8,000—” No. Oh, yes: “—from 10,000 to 15,000 units.”
He regained confidence. He thanked the god of science for antitoxin and for the gas motor. It was, he decided, a Race with Death.
“I’m going to do it—going to pull it off and save that poor kid!” he rejoiced.
He approached a grade crossing and hurled toward it, ignoring possible trains. He was aware of a devouring whistle, saw sliding light on the rails, and brought up sharp. Past him, ten feet from his front wheels, flung the Seattle Express like a flying volcano. The fireman was stoking, and even in the thin clearness of coming dawn the glow from the fire-box was appalling on the under side of the rolling smoke. Instantly the apparition was gone and Martin sat trembling, hands trembling on the little steering-wheel, foot trembling like St. Vitus’s dance on the brake. “That was an awful’ close thing!” he muttered, and thought of a widowed Leora, abandoned to Tozers. But the vision of the Novak child, struggling for each terriblebreath, overrode all else. “Hell! I’ve killed the engine!” he groaned. He vaulted over the side, cranked the car, and dashed into Leopolis.
To Crynssen County, Leopolis with its four thousand people was a metropolis, but in the pinched stillness of the dawn it was a tiny graveyard: Main Street a sandy expanse, the low shops desolate as huts. He found one place astir; in the bleak office of the Dakota Hotel the night clerk was playing poker with the ’bus-driver and the town policeman.
They wondered at his hysterical entrance.
“Dr. Arrowsmith, from Wheatsylvania. Kid dying from diphtheria. Where’s Blassner live? Jump in my car and show me.”
The constable was a lanky old man, his vest swinging open over a collarless shirt, his trousers in folds, his eyes resolute. He guided Martin to the home of the druggist, he kicked the door, then, standing with his lean and bristly visage upraised in the cold early light, he bawled, “Ed! Hey, you, Ed! Come out of it!”
Ed Blassner grumbled from the up-stairs window. To him, death and furious doctors had small novelty. While he drew on his trousers and coat he was to be heard discoursing to his drowsy wife on the woes of druggists and the desirability of moving to Los Angeles and going into real estate. But he did have diphtheria antitoxin in his shop, and sixteen minutes after Martin’s escape from being killed by a train he was speeding to Henry Novak’s.
The child was still alive when he came bruskly into the house.
All the way back he had seen her dead and stiff. He grunted “Thank God!” and angrily called for hot water. He was no longer the embarrassed cub doctor but the wise and heroic physician who had won the Race with Death, and in the peasant eyes of Mrs. Novak, in Henry’s nervous obedience, he read his power.
Swiftly, smoothly, he made intravenous injection of the antitoxin, and stood expectant.
The child’s breathing did not at first vary, as she choked in the labor of expelling her breath. There was a gurgle, astruggle in which her face blackened, and she was still. Martin peered, incredulous. Slowly the Novaks began to glower, shaky hands at their lips. Slowly they knew the child was gone.
In the hospital, death had become indifferent and natural to Martin. He had said to Angus, he had heard nurses say one to another, quite cheerfully, “Well, fifty-seven has just passed out.” Now he raged with desire to do the impossible. Shecouldn’tbe dead. He’d do something— All the while he was groaning, “I should’ve operated— I should have.” So insistent was the thought that for a time he did not realize that Mrs. Novak was clamoring, “She is dead? Dead?”
He nodded, afraid to look at the woman.
“You killed her, with that needle thing! And not even tell us, so we could call the priest!”
He crawled past her lamentations and the man’s sorrow, and drove home, empty of heart.
“I shall never practise medicine again,” he reflected.
“I’m through,” he said to Leora. “I’m no good. I should of operated. I can’t face people, when they know about it. I’m through. I’ll go get a lab job— Dawson Hunziker or some place.”
Salutary was the tartness with which she protested, “You’re the most conceited man that ever lived! Do you think you’re the only doctor that ever lost a patient? I know you did everything you could.” But he went about next day torturing himself, the more tortured when Mr. Tozer whined at supper, “Henry Novak and his woman was in town to-day. They say you ought to have saved their girl. Why didn’t you give your mind to it and manage to cure her somehow? Ought to tried. Kind of too bad, because the Novaks have a lot of influence with all these Pole and Hunky farmers.”
After a night when he was too tired to sleep, Martin suddenly drove to Leopolis.
From the Tozers he had heard almost religious praise of Dr. Adam Winter of Leopolis, a man of nearly seventy, the pioneer physician of Crynssen County, and to this sage he was fleeing. As he drove he mocked furiously his melodramatic Race with Death, and he came wearily into the dust-whirling Main Street. Dr. Winter’s office was above a grocery, in a long “block” of bright red brick stores with an Egyptian cornice—of tin. Thedarkness of the broad hallway was soothing after the prairie heat and incandescence. Martin had to wait till three respectful patients had been received by Dr. Winter, a hoary man with a sympathetic bass voice, before he was admitted to the consultation-room.
The examining-chair was of doubtful superiority to that once used by Doc Vickerson of Elk Mills, and sterilizing was apparently done in a wash-bowl, but in a corner was an electric therapeutic cabinet with more electrodes and pads than Martin had ever seen.
He told the story of the Novaks, and Winter cried, “Why, Doctor, you did everything you could have and more too. Only thing is, next time, in a crucial case, you better call some older doctor in consultation—not that you need his advice, but it makes a hit with the family, it divides the responsibility, and keeps ’em from going around criticizing. I, uh, I frequently have the honor of being called by some of my younger colleagues. Just wait. I’ll ’phone the editor of theGazetteand give him an item about the case.”
When he had telephoned, Dr. Winter shook hands ardently. He indicated his electric cabinet. “Got one of those things yet? Ought to, my boy. Don’t know as I use it very often, except with the cranks that haven’t anything the matter with ’em, but say, it would surprise you how it impresses folks. Well, Doctor, welcome to Crynssen County. Married? Won’t you and your wife come take dinner with us some Sunday noon? Mrs. Winter will be real pleased to meet you. And if I ever can be of service to you in a consultation— I only charge a very little more than my regular fee, and it looks so well, talking the case over with an older man.”
Driving home, Martin fell into vain and wicked boasting:
“You bet I’ll stick to it! At worst, I’ll never be as bad as that snuffling old fee-splitter!”
Two weeks after, theWheatsylvania Eagle, a smeary four-page rag, reported: