Our enterprising contemporary, theLeopolis Gazette, had as follows last week to say of one of our townsmen who we recently welcomed to our midst.“Dr. M. Arrowsmith of Wheatsylvania is being congratulated, we are informed by our valued pioneer local physician, Dr. Adam Winter, by the medical fraternity all through the Pony River Valley, there being no occupation or profession more unselfishly appreciative of each other’s virtues than the medical gentlemen, on the courage and enterprise he recently displayed in addition to his scientific skill.“Being called to attend the little daughter of Henry Norwalk of near Delft the well-known farmer and finding the little one near death with diphtheria he made a desperate attempt to save it by himself bringing antitoxin from Blassner our ever popular druggist, who had on hand a full and fresh supply. He drove out and back in his gasoline chariot, making the total distance of 48 miles in 79 minutes.“Fortunately our ever alert policeman, Joe Colby, was on the job and helped Dr. Arrowsmith find Mr. Blassner’s bungalow on Red River Avenue and this gentleman rose from bed and hastened to supply the doctor with the needed article but unfortunately the child was already too low to be saved but it is by such incidents of pluck and quick thinking as well as knowledge which make the medical profession one of our greatest blessings.â€
Our enterprising contemporary, theLeopolis Gazette, had as follows last week to say of one of our townsmen who we recently welcomed to our midst.
“Dr. M. Arrowsmith of Wheatsylvania is being congratulated, we are informed by our valued pioneer local physician, Dr. Adam Winter, by the medical fraternity all through the Pony River Valley, there being no occupation or profession more unselfishly appreciative of each other’s virtues than the medical gentlemen, on the courage and enterprise he recently displayed in addition to his scientific skill.
“Being called to attend the little daughter of Henry Norwalk of near Delft the well-known farmer and finding the little one near death with diphtheria he made a desperate attempt to save it by himself bringing antitoxin from Blassner our ever popular druggist, who had on hand a full and fresh supply. He drove out and back in his gasoline chariot, making the total distance of 48 miles in 79 minutes.
“Fortunately our ever alert policeman, Joe Colby, was on the job and helped Dr. Arrowsmith find Mr. Blassner’s bungalow on Red River Avenue and this gentleman rose from bed and hastened to supply the doctor with the needed article but unfortunately the child was already too low to be saved but it is by such incidents of pluck and quick thinking as well as knowledge which make the medical profession one of our greatest blessings.â€
Two hours after this was published, Miss Agnes Ingleblad came in for another discussion of her non-existent ailments, and two days later Henry Novak appeared, saying proudly:
“Well, Doc, we all done what we could for the poor little girl, but I guess I waited too long calling you. The woman is awful’ cut up. She and I was reading that piece in theEagleabout it. We showed it to the priest. Say, Doc, I wish you’d take a look at my foot. I got kind of a rheumatic pain in the ankle.â€
Whenhe had practised medicine in Wheatsylvania for one year, Martin was an inconspicuous but not discouraged country doctor. In summer Leora and he drove to the Pony River for picnic suppers and a swim, very noisy, splashing, and immodest; through autumn he went duck-hunting with Bert Tozer, who became nearly tolerable when he stood at sunset on a pass between two slews; and with winter isolating the village in a sun-blank desert of snow, they had sleigh-rides, card-parties, “sociables†at the churches.
When Martin’s flock turned to him for help, their need and their patient obedience made them beautiful. Once or twice he lost his temper with jovial villagers who bountifully explained to him that he was less aged than he might have been; once or twice he drank too much whisky at poker parties in the back room of the Coöperative Store; but he was known as reliable, skilful, and honest—and on the whole he was rather less distinguished than Alec Ingleblad the barber, less prosperous than Nils Krag, the carpenter, and less interesting to his neighbors than the Finnish garageman.
Then one accident and one mistake made him famous for full twelve miles about.
He had gone fishing, in the spring. As he passed a farmhouse a woman ran out shrieking that her baby had swallowed a thimble and was choking to death. Martin had for surgical kit a large jack-knife. He sharpened it on the farmer’s oilstone, sterilized it in the tea-kettle, operated on the baby’s throat, and saved its life.
Every newspaper in the Pony River Valley had a paragraph, and before this sensation was over he cured Miss Agnes Ingleblad of her desire to be cured.
She had achieved cold hands and a slow circulation, and he was called at midnight. He was soggily sleepy, after two country drives on muddy roads, and in his torpor he gave her an overdose of strychnin, which so shocked and stimulated herthat she decided to be well. It was so violent a change that it made her more interesting than being an invalid—people had of late taken remarkably small pleasure in her symptoms. She went about praising Martin, and all the world said, “I hear this Doc Arrowsmith is the only fellow Agnes ever doctored with that’s done her a mite of good.â€
He gathered a practise small, sound, and in no way remarkable. Leora and he moved from the Tozers’ to a cottage of their own, with a parlor-dining-room which displayed a nickeled stove on bright, new, pleasant-smelling linoleum, and a goldenoak sideboard with a souvenir match-holder from Lake Minnetonka. He bought a small Roentgen ray outfit; and he was made a director of the Tozer bank. He became too busy to long for his days of scientific research, which had never existed, and Leora sighed:
“It’s fierce, being married. I did expect I’d have to follow you out on the road and be a hobo, but I never expected to be a Pillar of the Community. Well, I’m too lazy to look up a new husband. Only I warn you: when you become the Sunday School superintendent, you needn’t expect me to play the organ and smile at the cute jokes you make about Willy’s not learning his Golden Text.â€
So did Martin stumble into respectability.
In the autumn of 1912, when Mr. Debs, Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Wilson, and Mr. Taft were campaigning for the presidency, when Martin Arrowsmith had lived in Wheatsylvania for a year and a half, Bert Tozer became a Prominent Booster. He returned from the state convention of the Modern Woodmen of America with notions. Several towns had sent boosting delegations to the convention, and the village of Groningen had turned out a motor procession of five cars, each with an enormous pennant, “Groningen for White Men and Black Dirt.â€
Bert came back clamoring that every motor in town must carry a Wheatsylvania pennant. He had bought thirty of them, and they were on sale at the bank at seventy-five cents apiece. This, Bert explained to every one who came into the bank, was exactly cost-price, which was within eleven cents of the truth. He came galloping at Martin, demanding that he be the first to display a pennant.
“I don’t want one of those fool things flopping from my ’bus,†protested Martin. “What’s the idea, anyway?â€
“What’s theidea? To advertise your own town, of course!â€
“What is there to advertise? Do you think you’re going to make strangers believe Wheatsylvania is a metropolis like New York or Jimtown by hanging a dusty rag behind a second-hand tin lizzie?â€
“You never did have any patriotism! Let me tell you, Mart, if you don’t put on a banner I’ll see to it that everybody in town notices it!â€
While the other rickety cars of the village announced to the world, or at least to several square miles of the world, that Wheatsylvania was the “Wonder Town of Central N. D.,†Martin’s clattering Ford went bare; and when his enemy Norblom remarked, “I like to see a fellow have some public spirit and appreciate the place he gets his money outa,†the citizenry nodded and spat, and began to question Martin’s fame as a worker of miracles.
He had intimates—the barber, the editor of theEagle, the garageman—to whom he talked comfortably of hunting and the crops, and with whom he played poker. Perhaps he was too intimate with them. It was the theory of Crynssen County that it was quite all right for a young professional man to take a timely drink providing he kept it secret and made up for it by yearning over the clergy of the neighborhood. But with the clergy Martin was brief, and his drinking and poker he never concealed.
If he was bored by the United Brethren minister’s discourse on doctrine, on the wickedness of movies, and the scandalous pay of pastors, it was not at all because he was a distant and supersensitive young man but because he found more savor in the garageman’s salty remarks on the art of remembering to ante in poker.
Through all the state there were celebrated poker players, rustic-looking men with stolid faces, men who sat in shirt-sleeves, chewing tobacco; men whose longest remark was “By me,†and who delighted to plunder the gilded and condescending traveling salesmen. When there was news of a “big game on,†the county sports dropped in silently and went to work—the sewing-machine agent from Leopolis, the undertaker from Vanderheide’s Grove, the bootlegger from St. Luke, the red fat man from Melody who had no known profession.
Once (still do men tell of it gratefully, up and down the Valley), they played for seventy-two unbroken hours, in the office of the Wheatsylvania garage. It had been a livery-stable; it was littered with robes and long whips, and the smell of horses mingled with the reek of gasoline.
The players came and went, and sometimes they slept on the floor for an hour or two, but they were never less than four in the game. The stink of cheap feeble cigarettes and cheap powerful cigars hovered about the table like a malign spirit; the floor was scattered with stubs, matches, old cards, and whisky bottles. Among the warriors were Martin, Alec Ingleblad the barber, and a highway engineer, all of them stripped to flannel undershirts, not moving for hour on hour, ruffling their cards, eyes squinting and vacant.
When Bert Tozer heard of the affair, he feared for the good fame of Wheatsylvania, and to every one he gossiped about Martin’s evil ways and his own patience. Thus it happened that while Martin was at the height of his prosperity and credit as a physician, along the Pony River Valley sinuated the whispers that he was a gambler, that he was a “drinking man,†that he never went to church; and all the godly enjoyed mourning, “Too bad to see a decent young man like that going to the dogs.â€
Martin was as impatient as he was stubborn. He resented the well-meant greetings: “You ought to leave a little hooch for the rest of us to drink, Doc,†or “I s’pose you’re too busy playing poker to drive out to the house and take a look at the woman.†He was guilty of an absurd and boyish tactlessness when he heard Norblom observing to the postmaster, “A fellow that calls himself a doctor just because he had luck with that fool Agnes Ingleblad, he hadn’t ought to go getting drunk and disgracing—â€
Martin stopped. “Norblom! You talking about me?â€
The storekeeper turned slowly. “I got more important things to do ’n talk about you,†he cackled.
As Martin went on he heard laughter.
He told himself that these villagers were generous; that their snooping was in part an affectionate interest, and inevitable in a village where the most absorbing event of theyear was the United Brethren Sunday School picnic on Fourth of July. But he could not rid himself of twitchy discomfort at their unending and maddeningly detailed comments on everything. He felt as though the lightest word he said in his consultation-room would be megaphoned from flapping ear to ear all down the country roads.
He was contented enough in gossiping about fishing with the barber, nor was he condescending to meteorologicomania, but except for Leora he had no one with whom he could talk of his work. Angus Duer had been cold, but Angus had his teeth into every change of surgical technique, and he was an acrid debater. Martin saw that, unless he struggled, not only would he harden into timid morality under the pressure of the village, but be fixed in a routine of prescriptions and bandaging.
He might find a stimulant in Dr. Hesselink of Groningen.
He had seen Hesselink only once, but everywhere he heard of him as the most honest practitioner in the Valley. On impulse Martin drove down to call on him.
Dr. Hesselink was a man of forty, ruddy, tall, broad-shouldered. You knew immediately that he was careful and that he was afraid of nothing, however much he might lack in imagination. He received Martin with no vast ebullience, and his stare said, “Well, what do you want? I’m a busy man.â€
“Doctor,†Martin chattered, “do you find it hard to keep up with medical developments?â€
“No. Read the medical journals.â€
“Well, don’t you—gosh, I don’t want to get sentimental about it, but don’t you find that without contact with the Big Guns you get mentally lazy—sort of lacking in inspiration?â€
“I do not! There’s enough inspiration for me in trying to help the sick.â€
To himself Martin was protesting, “All right, if you don’t want to be friendly, go to the devil!†But he tried again:
“I know. But for the game of the thing, for the pleasure of increasing medical knowledge, how can you keep up if you don’t have anything but routine practise among a lot of farmers?â€
“Arrowsmith, I may do you an injustice, but there’s a lot of you young practitioners who feel superior to the farmers, that are doing their own jobs better than you are. You think that if you were only in the city with libraries and medicalmeetings and everything, you’d develop. Well, I don’t know of anything to prevent your studying at home! You consider yourself so much better educated than these rustics, but I notice you say ‘gosh’ and ‘Big Guns’ and that sort of thing. How much do you read? Personally, I’m extremely well satisfied. My people pay me an excellent living wage, they appreciate my work, and they honor me by election to the schoolboard. I find that a good many of these farmers think a lot harder and squarer than the swells I meet in the city. Well! I don’t see any reason for feeling superior, or lonely either!â€
“Hell, I don’t!†Martin mumbled. As he drove back he raged at Hesselink’s superiority about not feeling superior, but he stumbled into uncomfortable meditation. It was true; he was half-educated. He was supposed to be a college graduate but he knew nothing of economics, nothing of history, nothing of music or painting. Except in hasty bolting for examinations he had read no poetry save that of Robert Service, and the only prose besides medical journalism at which he looked nowadays was the baseball and murder news in the Minneapolis papers and Wild West stories in the magazines.
He reviewed the “intelligent conversation†which, in the desert of Wheatsylvania, he believed himself to have conducted at Mohalis. He remembered that to Clif Clawson it had been pretentious to use any phrase which was not as colloquial and as smutty as the speech of a truck-driver, and that his own discourse had differed from Clif’s largely in that it had been less fantastic and less original. He could recall nothing save the philosophy of Max Gottlieb, occasional scoldings of Angus Duer, one out of ten among Madeline Fox’s digressions, and the councils of Dad Silva which was above the level of Alec Ingleblad’s barber-shop.
He came home hating Hesselink but by no means loving himself; he fell upon Leora and, to her placid agreement, announced that they were “going to get educated, if it kills us.†He went at it as he had gone at bacteriology.
He read European history aloud at Leora, who looked interested or at least forgiving; he worried the sentences in a copy of “The Golden Bowl†which an unfortunate school-teacher had left at the Tozers’; he borrowed a volume of Conrad from the village editor and afterward, as he drove the prairie roads, he was marching into jungle villages—sun helmets, orchids, lost temples of obscene and dog-faced deities, secret and sun-scarred rivers. He was conscious of his own mean vocabulary. It cannot be said that he became immediately and conspicuously articulate, yet it is possible that in those long intense evenings of reading with Leora he advanced a step or two toward the tragic enchantments of Max Gottlieb’s world—enchanting sometimes and tragic always.
But in becoming a schoolboy again he was not so satisfied as Dr. Hesselink.
Gustaf Sondelius was back in America.
In medical school, Martin had read of Sondelius, the soldier of science. He held reasonable and lengthy degrees, but he was a rich man and eccentric, and neither toiled in laboratories nor had a decent office and a home and a lacy wife. He roamed the world fighting epidemics and founding institutions and making inconvenient speeches and trying new drinks. He was a Swede by birth, a German by education, a little of everything by speech, and his clubs were in London, Paris, Washington, and New York. He had been heard of from Batoum and Fuchau, from Milan and Bechuanaland, from Antofagasta and Cape Romanzoff. Manson on Tropical Diseases mentions Sondelius’s admirable method of killing rats with hydrocyanic acid gas, andThe Sketchonce mentioned his atrocious system in baccarat.
Gustaf Sondelius shouted, in high places and low, that most diseases could be and must be wiped out; that tuberculosis, cancer, typhoid, the plague, influenza, were an invading army against which the world must mobilize—literally; that public health authorities must supersede generals and oil kings. He was lecturing through America, and his exclamatory assertions were syndicated in the press.
Martin sniffed at most newspaper articles touching on science or health but Sondelius’s violence caught him, and suddenly he was converted, and it was an important thing for him, that conversion.
He told himself that however much he might relieve the sick, essentially he was a business man, in rivalry with Dr. Winter of Leopolis and Dr. Hesselink of Groningen; that though they might be honest, honesty and healing were less their purpose than making money; that to get rid of avoidable disease andproduce a healthy population would be the worst thing in the world for them; and that they must all be replaced by public health officials.
Like all ardent agnostics, Martin was a religious man. Since the death of his Gottlieb-cult he had unconsciously sought a new passion, and he found it now in Gustaf Sondelius’s war on disease. Immediately he became as annoying to his patients as he had once been to Digamma Pi.
He informed the farmers at Delft that they had no right to have so much tuberculosis.
This was infuriating, because none of their rights as American citizens was better established, or more often used, than the privilege of being ill. They fumed, “Who does he think he is? We call him in for doctoring, not for bossing. Why, the damn’ fool said we ought to burn down our houses—said we were committing a crime if we had the con. here! Won’t stand for nobody talking to me like that!â€
Everything became clear to Martin—too clear. The nation must make the best physicians autocratic officials, at once, and that was all there was to it. As to how the officials were to become perfect executives, and how people were to be persuaded to obey them, he had no suggestions but only a beautiful faith. At breakfast he scolded, “Another idiotic day of writing prescriptions for bellyaches that ought never to have happened! If I could only get into the Big Fight, along with men like Sondelius! It makes me tired!â€
Leora murmured, “Yes, darling. I’ll promise to be good. I won’t have any little bellyaches or T. B. or anything, so please don’t lecture me!â€
Even in his irritability he was gentle, for Leora was with child.
Their baby was coming in five months. Martin promised to it everything he had missed.
“He’s going to have a real education!†he gloated, as they sat on the porch in spring twilight. “He’ll learn all this literature and stuff. We haven’t done much ourselves—here we are, stuck in this two-by-twice crossroads for the rest of our lives—but maybe we’ve gone a little beyond our dads, and he’ll go way beyond us.â€
He was worried, for all his flamboyance. Leora had undue morning sickness. Till noon she dragged about the house, pea-green and tousled and hollow-faced. He found a sort of maid, and came home to help, to wipe the dishes and sweep the front walk. All evening he read to her, not history now and Henry James but “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch,†which both of them esteemed a very fine tale. He sat on the floor by the grubby second-hand couch on which she lay in her weakness; he held her hand and crowed:
“Golly, we— No, not ‘golly’. Well, whatcanyou say except ‘golly’? Anyway: Someday we’ll save up enough money for a couple months in Italy and all those places. All those old narrow streets and old castles! There must be scads of ’em that are couple hundred years old or older! And we’ll take the boy.... Even if he turns out to be a girl, darn him!... And he’ll learn to chatter Wop and French and everything like a regular native, and his dad and mother’ll be so proud! Oh, we’ll be a fierce pair of old birds! We never did have any more morals ’n a rabbit, either of us, and probably when we’re seventy we’ll sit out on the doorstep and smoke pipes and snicker at all the respectable people going by, and tell each other scandalous stories about ’em till they want to take a shot at us, and our boy—he’ll wear a plug hat and have a chauffeur—he won’t dare to recognize us!â€
Trained now to the false cheerfulness of the doctor, he shouted, when she was racked and ghastly with the indignity of morning sickness, “There, that’s fine, old girl! Wouldn’t be making a good baby if you weren’t sick. Everybody is.†He was lying, and he was nervous. Whenever he thought of her dying, he seemed to die with her. Barren of her companionship, there would be nothing he wanted to do, nowhere to go. What would be the worth of having all the world if he could not show it to her, if she was not there—
He denounced Nature for her way of tricking human beings, by every gay device of moonlight and white limbs and reaching loneliness, into having babies, then making birth as cruel and clumsy and wasteful as she could. He was abrupt and jerky with patients who called him into the country. With their suffering he was sympathetic as he had never been, for his eyes had opened to the terrible beauty of pain, but he must not go far from Leora’s need.
Her morning sickness turned into pernicious vomiting. Suddenly, while she was torn and inhuman with agony, he sent for Dr. Hesselink, and that horrible afternoon when the prairie spring was exuberant outside the windows of the poor iodoform-reeking room, they took the baby from her, dead.
Had it been possible, he might have understood Hesselink’s success then, have noted that gravity and charm, that pity and sureness, which made people entrust their lives to him. Not cold and blaming was Hesselink now, but an older and wiser brother, very compassionate. Martin saw nothing. He was not a physician. He was a terrified boy, less useful to Hesselink than the dullest nurse.
When he was certain that Leora would recover, Martin sat by her bed, coaxing, “We’ll just have to make up our minds we never can have a baby now, and so I want— Oh, I’m no good! And I’ve got a rotten temper. But to you, I want to be everything!â€
She whispered, scarce to be heard:
“He would have been such a sweet baby. Oh, I know! I saw him so often. Because I knew he was going to be like you, when you were a baby.†She tried to laugh. “Perhaps I wanted him because I could boss him. I’ve never had anybody that would let me boss him. So if I can’t have a real baby, I’ll have to bring you up. Make you a great man that everybody will wonder at, like your Sondelius.... Darling, I worried so about your worrying—â€
He kissed her, and for hours they sat together, unspeaking, eternally understanding, in the prairie twilight.
Dr. Coughlinof Leopolis had a red mustache, a large heartiness, and a Maxwell which, though it was three years old this May and deplorable as to varnish, he believed to be the superior in speed and beauty of any motor in Dakota.
He came home in high cheerfulness, rode the youngest of his three children pickaback, and remarked to his wife:
“Tessie, I got a swell idea.â€
“Yes, and you got a swell breath, too. I wish you’d quit testing that old Spirits Frumentus bottle at the drug store!â€
“’At a girl! But honest, listen!â€
“I will not!†She bussed him heartily. “Nothing doing about driving to Los Angeles this summer. Too far, with all the brats squalling.â€
“Sure. All right. But I mean: Let’s pack up and light out and spend a week touring ’round the state. Say to-morrow or next day. Got nothing to keep me now except that obstetrical case, and we’ll hand that over to Winter.â€
“All right. We can try out the new thermos bottles!â€
Dr. Coughlin, his lady, and the children started at four in morning. The car was at first too well arranged to be interesting, but after three days, as he approached you on the flat road that without an inch of curving was slashed for leagues through the grassy young wheat, you saw the doctor in his khaki suit, his horn-rimmed spectacles, and white linen boating hat; his wife in a green flannel blouse and a lace boudoir cap. The rest of the car was slightly confused. While you motored by you noticed a canvas Egyptian Water Bottle, mud on wheels and fenders, a spade, two older children leaning perilously out and making tongues at you, the baby’s diapers hanging on a line across the tonneau, a torn copy ofSnappy Stories, seven lollypop sticks, a jack, a fish-rod, and a rolled tent.
Your last impression was of two large pennants labeled “Leopolis, N. D.,†and “Excuse Our Dust.â€
The Coughlins had agreeable adventures. Once they werestuck in a mud-hole. To the shrieking admiration of the family, the doctor got them out by making a bridge of fence rails. Once the ignition ceased and, while they awaited a garageman summoned by telephone, they viewed a dairy farm with an electrical milking machine. All the way they were broadened by travel, and discovered the wonders of the great world: the movie theater at Roundup, which had for orchestra not only a hand-played piano but also a violin; the black fox farm at Melody; and the Severance water-tower, which was said to be the tallest in Central North Dakota.
Dr. Coughlin “dropped in to pass the time of day,†as he said, with all the doctors. At St. Luke he had an intimate friend in Dr. Tromp—at least they had met twice, at the annual meetings of the Pony River Valley Medical Association. When he told Tromp how bad they had found the hotels, Tromp looked uneasy and conscientious, and sighed, “If the wife could fix it up somehow, I’d like to invite you all to stay with us to-night.â€
“Oh, don’t want to impose on you. Sure it wouldn’t be any trouble?†said Coughlin.
After Mrs. Tromp had recovered from her desire to call her husband aside and make unheard but vigorous observations, and after the oldest Tromp boy had learned that “it wasn’t nice for a little gentleman to kick his wee guests that came from so far, far away,†they were all very happy. Mrs. Coughlin and Mrs. Tromp bewailed the cost of laundry soap and butter, and exchanged recipes for pickled peaches, while the men, sitting on the edge of the porch, their knees crossed, eloquently waving their cigars, gave themselves up to the ecstasy of shop-talk:
“Say, Doctor, how do you find collections?â€
(It was Coughlin speaking—or it might have been Tromp.)
“Well, they’re pretty good. These Germans pay up first rate. Never send ’em a bill, but when they’ve harvested they come in and say, ‘How much do I owe you, Doctor?’â€
“Yuh, the Germans are pretty good pay.â€
“Yump, they certainly are. Not many dead-beats among the Germans.â€
“Yes, that’s a fact. Say, tell me, Doctor, what do you do with your jaundice cases?â€
“Well, I’ll tell you, Doctor: if it’s a persistent case I usually give ammonium chlorid.â€
“Do you? I’ve been giving ammonium chlorid but here theother day I see a communication in theJournal of the A.M.A.where a fellow was claiming it wasn’t any good.â€
“Is that a fact! Well, well! I didn’t see that. Hum. Well. Say, Doctor, do you find you can do much with asthma?â€
“Well now, Doctor, just in confidence, I’m going to tell you something that may strike you as funny, but I believe that foxes’ lungs are fine for asthma, and T.B. too. I told that to a Sioux City pulmonary specialist one time and he laughed at me—said it wasn’t scientific—and I said to him, ‘Hell!’ I said, ‘scientific!’ I said, ‘I don’t know if it’s the latest fad and wrinkle in science or not,’ I said, ‘but I get results, and that’s what I’m looking for ’s results!’ I said. I tell you a plug G.P. may not have a lot of letters after his name, but he sees a slew of mysterious things that he can’t explain, and I swear I believe most of these damn’ alleged scientists could learn a whale of a lot from the plain country practitioners, let me tell you!’
“Yuh, that’s a fact. Personally I’d rather stay right here in the country and be able to do a little hunting and take it easy than be the classiest specialist in the cities. One time I kind of figured on becoming an X-ray specialist—place in New York where you can take the whole course in eight weeks—and maybe settling in Butte or Sioux Falls, but I figured that even if I got to making eight-ten thousand a year, ’twouldn’t hardly mean more than three thousand does here and so— And a fellow has to consider his duty to his old patients.â€
“That’s so.... Say, Doctor, say what sort of fellow is McMinturn, down your way?â€
“Well, I don’t like to knock any fellow practitioner, and I suppose he’s well intentioned, but just between you and me he does too confounded much guesswork. Now you take you and me, we applyscienceto a case, instead of taking a chance and just relying on experience and going off half-cocked. But McMinturn, he doesn’t know enough. Andsay, that wife of his, she’s, a caution—she’s got the meanest tongue in four counties, and the way she chases around drumming up business for Mac— Well, I suppose that’s their way of doing business.â€
“Is old Winter keeping going?â€
“Oh, yes, in a sort of way. You know how he is. Of course he’s about twenty years behind the times, but he’s a great hand-holder—keep some fool woman in bed six weeks longer than he needs to, and call around twice a day and chin with her—absolutely unnecessary.â€
“I suppose you get your biggest competition from Silzer, Doctor?â€
“Don’t you believe it, Doctor! He isn’t beginning to do the practise he lets on to. Trouble with Silzer is, he’s too brash—shoots off his mouth too much—likes to hear himself talk. Oh, say, by the way, have you run into this new fellow—will been located here about two years now—at Wheatsylvania— Arrowsmith?â€
“No, but they say he’s a good bright young fellow.â€
“Yes, they claim he’s a brainy man—very well-informed—and I hear his wife is a nice brainy little woman.â€
“I hear Arrowsmith hits it up too much though—likes his booze awful’ well.â€
“Yes, so they say. Shame, for a nice hustling young fellow. I like a nip myself, now and then, but a Drinking Man—! Suppose he’s drunk and gets called out on a case! And a fellow from down there was telling me Arrowsmith is great on books and study, but he’s a freethinker—never goes to church.â€
“Is that a fact! Hm. Great mistake for any doctor to not identify himself with some good solid religious denomination, whether he believes the stuff or not. I tell you a priest or a preacher can send you an awful lot of business.â€
“You bet he can! Well, this fellow said Arrowsmith was always arguing with the preachers—he told some Reverend that everybody ought to read this immunologist Max Gottlieb, and this Jacques Loeb—you know—the fellow that, well I don’t recall just exactly what it was, but he claimed he could create living fishes out of chemicals.â€
“Sure! There you got it! That’s the kind of delusions these laboratory fellows get unless they have some practical practise to keep ’em well balanced. Well, if Arrowsmith falls for that kind of fellow, no wonder people don’t trust him.â€
“That’s so. Hm. Well, it’s too bad Arrowsmith goes drinking and helling around and neglecting his family and his patients. I can see his finish. Shame. Well—wonder what time o’ night it’s getting to be?â€
Bert Tozer wailed, “Mart, what you been doing to Dr. Coughlin of Leopolis? Fellow told me he was going around saying you were a boose-hoister and so on.â€
“Did he? People do sort of keep an eye on one another around here, don’t they.â€
“You bet your life they do, and that’s why I tell you you ought to cut out the poker and the booze. You don’t seemeneeding any liquor, do you?â€
Martin more desperately than ever felt the whole county watching him. He was not a praise-eater; he was not proud that he should feel misplaced; but however sturdily he struggled he saw himself outside the picture of Wheatsylvania and trudging years of country practise.
Suddenly, without planning it, forgetting in his admiration for Sondelius and the health war his pride of the laboratory, he was thrown into a research problem.
There was blackleg among the cattle in Crynssen County. The state veterinarian had been called and Dawson Hunziker vaccine had been injected, but the disease spread. Martin heard the farmers wailing. He noted that the injected cattle showed no inflammation nor rise in temperature. He was roused by a suspicion that the Hunziker vaccine had insufficient living organisms, and he went yelping on the trail of his hypothesis.
He obtained (by misrepresentations) a supply of the vaccine and tested it in his stuffy closet of a laboratory. He had to work out his own device for growing anaërobic cultures, but he had been trained by the Gottlieb who remarked, “Any man dat iss unable to build a filter out of toot’-picks, if he has to, would maybe better buy his results along with his fine equipment.†Out of a large fruit-jar and a soldered pipe Martin made his apparatus.
When he was altogether sure that the vaccine did not contain living blackleg organisms, he was much more delighted than if he had found that good Mr. Dawson Hunziker was producing honest vaccine.
With no excuse and less encouragement he isolated blackleg organisms from sick cattle and prepared an attenuated vaccine of his own. It took much time. He did not neglect his patients but certainly he failed to appear in the stores, at the poker games. Leora and he dined on a sandwich every evening and hastened to the laboratory, to heat the cultures in the improvised water-bath, an ancient and leaky oatmeal-cooker with an alcohol lamp. The Martin who had been impatient of Hesselink was of endless patience as he watched his results. He whistled and hummed, and the hours from seven to midnight were a moment. Leora, frowning placidly, the tip of her tongue at the corner of her mouth, guarded the temperature like a good little watchdog.
After three efforts with two absurd failures, he had a vaccine which satisfied him, and he injected a stricken herd. The blackleg stopped, which was for Martin the end and the reward, and he turned his notes and supply of vaccine over to the state veterinarian. For others, it was not the end. The veterinarians of the county denounced him for intruding on their right to save or kill cattle; the physicians hinted, “That’s the kind of monkey-business that ruins the dignity of the profession. I tell you Arrowsmith’s a medical nihilist and a notoriety-seeker, that’s what he is. You mark my words, instead of his sticking to decent regular practise, you’ll be hearing of his opening a quack sanitarium, one of these days!â€
He commented to Leora:
“Dignity, hell! If I had my way I’d be doing research—oh, not this cold detached stuff of Gottlieb but really practical work—and then I’d have some fellow like Sondelius take my results and jam ’em down people’s throats, and I’d make them and their cattle and their tabby-cats healthy whether they wanted to be or not, that’s what I’d do!â€
In this mood he read in his Minneapolis paper, between a half column on the marriage of the light middleweight champion and three lines devoted to the lynching of an I.W.W. agitator, the announcement:
Gustave Sundelios, well-known authority on cholera prevention, will give an address on “Heroes of Health†at the University summer school next Friday evening.
Gustave Sundelios, well-known authority on cholera prevention, will give an address on “Heroes of Health†at the University summer school next Friday evening.
He ran into the house gloating, “Lee! Sondelius going to lecture in Minneapolis. I’m going! Come on! We’ll hear him and have a bat and everything!â€
“No, you run down by yourself. Be fine for you to get away from the town and the family and me for a while. I’ll go down with you in the fall. Honestly. If I’m not in the way, maybe you can manage to have a good long talk with Dr. Sondelius.â€
“Fat chance! The big city physicians and the state health authorities will be standing around him ten deep. But I’m going.â€
The prairie was hot, the wheat rattled in a weary breeze, the day-coach was gritty with cinders. Martin was cramped by the hours of slow riding. He drowsed and smoked and meditated. “I’m going to forget medicine and everything else,†he vowed. “I’ll go up and talk to somebody in the smoker and tell him I’m a shoe-salesman.â€
He did. Unfortunately his confidant happened to be a real shoe-salesman, with a large curiosity as to what firm Martin represented, and he returned to the day coach with a renewed sense of injury. When he reached Minneapolis, in mid-afternoon, he hastened to the University and besought a ticket to the Sondelius lecture before he had even found a hotel, though not before he had found the long glass of beer which he had been picturing for a hundred miles.
He had an informal but agreeable notion of spending his first evening of freedom in dissipation. Somewhere he would meet a company of worthies who would succor him with laughter and talk and many drinks—not too many drinks, of course—and motor very rapidly to Lake Minnetonka for a moonlight swim. He began his search for the brethren by having a cocktail at a hotel bar and dinner in a Hennepin Avenue restaurant. Nobody looked at him, nobody seemed to desire a companion. He was lonely for Leora, and all his state of grace, all his earnest and simple-hearted devotion to carousal, degenerated into sleepiness.
As he turned and turned in his hotel bed he lamented, “And probably the Sondelius lecture will be rotten. Probably he’s simply another Roscoe Geake.â€
In the hot night desultory students wandered up to the door of the lecture-hall, scanned the modest Sondelius poster, and ambled away. Martin was half minded to desert with them, and he went in sulkily. The hall was a third full of summer students and teachers, and men who might have been doctorsor school-principals. He sat at the back, fanning with his straw hat, disliking the man with side-whiskers who shared the row with him, disapproving of Gustaf Sondelius, and as to himself having no good opinions whatever.
Then the room was charged with vitality. Down the central aisle, ineffectively attended by a small fussy person, thundered a man with a smile, a broad brow, and a strawpile of curly flaxen hair—a Newfoundland dog of a man. Martin sat straight. He was strengthened to endure even the depressing man with side-whiskers as Sondelius launched out, in a musical bellow with Swedish pronunciation and Swedish singsong:
“The medical profession can have but one desire: to destroy the medical profession. As for the laymen, they can be sure of but one thing: nine-tenths of what they know about health is not so, and with the other tenth they do nothing. As Butler shows in ‘Erewhon’—the swine stole that idea from me, too, maybe thirty years before I ever got it—the only crime for w’ich we should hang people is having toobercoolosis.â€
“Umph!†grunted the studious audience, doubtful whether it was fitting to be amused, offended, bored, or edified.
Sondelius was a roarer and a playboy, but he knew incantations. With him Martin watched the heroes of yellow fever, Reed, Agramonte, Carroll, and Lazear; with him he landed in a Mexican port stilled with the plague and famished beneath the virulent sun; with him rode up the mountain trails to a hill town rotted with typhus; with him, in crawling August, when babies were parched skeletons, fought an ice trust beneath the gilt and blunted sword of the law.
“That’s what I want to do! Not just tinker at a lot of worn-out bodies but make a new world!†Martin hungered. “Gosh, I’d follow him through fire! And the way he lays out the crapehangers that criticize public health results! If I could only manage to meet him and talk to him for a couple o’ minutes—â€
He lingered after the lecture. A dozen people surrounded Sondelius on the platform; a few shook hands; a few asked questions; a doctor worried, “But how about the danger of free clinics and all those things drifting into socialism?†Martin stood back till Sondelius had been deserted. A janitor was closing the windows, very firmly and suggestively. Sondelius looked about, and Martin would have sworn that the Great Man was lonely. He shook hands with him, and quaked:
“Sir, if you aren’t due some place, I wonder if you’d like to come out and have a—a—â€
Sondelius loomed over him in solar radiance and rumbled, “Have a drink? Well I think maybe I would. How did the joke about the dog and his fleas go to-night? Do you think they liked it?â€
“Oh, sure, you bet.â€
The warrior who had been telling of feeding five thousand Tatars, of receiving a degree from a Chinese university and refusing a decoration from quite a good Balkan king, looked affectionately on his band of one disciple and demanded, “Was it all right—was it? Did they like it? So hot to-night, and I been lecturing nine time a week— Des Moines, Fort Dodge, LaCrosse, Elgin, Joliet (but he pronounced it Zho-lee-ay) and— I forget. Was it all right? Did they like it?â€
“Simply corking! Oh, they just ate it up! Honestly, I’ve never enjoyed anything so much in my life!â€
The prophet crowed, “Come! I buy a drink. As a hygienist, I war on alcohol. In excessive quantities it is almost as bad as coffee or even ice cream soda. But as one who is fond of talking, I find a nice long whisky and soda a great solvent of human idiocy. Is there a cool place with some Pilsener here in Detroit—no; where am I to-night?— Minneapolis?â€
“I understand there’s a good beer-garden. And we can get the trolley right near here.â€
Sondelius stared at him. “Oh, I have a taxi waiting.â€
Martin was abashed by this luxury. In the taxi-cab he tried to think of the proper things to say to a celebrity.
“Tell me, Doctor, do they have city health boards in Europe?â€
Sondelius ignored him. “Did you see that girl going by? What ankles! What shoulders! Is it good beer at the beer-garden? Have they any decent cognac? Do you know Courvoisier 1865 cognac? Oof! Lecturing! I swear I will give it up. And wearing dress clothes a night like this! You know, I mean all the crazy things I say in my lectures, but let us now forget being earnest, let us drink, let us sing ‘Der Graf von Luxemburg,’ let us detach exquisite girls from their escorts, let us discuss the joys of ‘Die Meistersinger,’ which only I appreciate!â€
In the beer-garden the tremendous Sondelius discoursed of the Cosmos Club, Halle’s investigation of infant morality, thesuitability of combining benedictine and apple-jack, Biarritz, Lord Haldane, the Doane-Buckley method of milk examination, George Gissing, andhomard thermidor, Martin looked for a connection between Sondelius and himself, as one does with the notorious or with people met abroad. He might have said, “I think I met a man who knows you,†or “I have had the pleasure of reading all your articles,†but he fished with “Did you ever run into the two big men in my medical school— Winnemac— Dean Silva and Max Gottlieb?â€
“Silva? I don’t remember. But Gottlieb—you know him? Oh!†Sondelius waved his mighty arms. “The greatest! The spirit of science! I had the pleasure to talk with him at McGurk. He would not sit here bawling like me! He makes me like a circus clown! He takes all my statements about epidemiology and shows me I am a fool! Ho, ho, ho!†He beamed, and was off on a denunciation of high tariff.
Each topic had its suitable refreshment. Sondelius was a fantastic drinker, and zinc-lined. He mixed Pilsener, whisky, black coffee, and a liquid which the waiter asserted to be absinthe. “I should go to bed at midnight,†he lamented, “but it is a cardinal sin to interrupt good talk. Yoost tempt me a little! I am an easy one to be tempted! But I must have five hours’ sleep. Absolute! I lecture in—it’s some place in Iowa—to-morrow evening. Now that I am past fifty, I cannot get along with three hours as I used to, and yet I have found so many new things that I want to talk about.â€
He was more eloquent than ever; then he was annoyed. A surly-looking man at the next table listened and peered, and laughed at them. Sondelius dropped from Haffkine’s cholera serum to an irate:
“If that fellow stares at me some more, I am going over and kill him! I am a peaceful man, now that I am not so young, but I do not like starers. I will go and argue with him. I will yoost hit him a little!â€
While the waiters came rushing, Sondelius charged the man, threatened him with enormous fists, then stopped, shook hands repeatedly, and brought him back to Martin.
“This is a born countryman of mine, from Gottenborg. He is a carpenter. Sit down, Nilsson, sit down and have a drink. Herumph! VAI-ter!â€
The carpenter was a socialist, a Swedish Seventh Day Adventist, a ferocious arguer, and fond of drinking aquavit. He denounced Sondelius as an aristocrat, he denounced Martin for his ignorance of economics, he denounced the waiter concerning the brandy; Sondelius and Martin and the waiter answered with vigor; and the conversation became admirable. Presently they were turned out of the beer-garden and the three of them crowded into the still waiting taxicab, which shook to their debating. Where they went, Martin could never trace. He may have dreamed the whole tale. Once they were apparently in a roadhouse on a long street which must have been University Avenue; once in a saloon on Washington Avenue South, where three tramps were sleeping at the end of the bar; once in the carpenter’s house, where an unexplained man made coffee for them.
Wherever they might be, they were at the same time in Moscow and Curaçao and Murwillumbah. The carpenter created communistic states, while Sondelius, proclaiming that he did not care whether he worked under socialism or an emperor so long as he could bully people into being well, annihilated tuberculosis and by dawn had cancer fleeing.
They parted at four, tearfully swearing to meet again, in Minnesota or Stockholm, in Rio or on the southern seas, and Martin started for Wheatsylvania to put an end to all this nonsense of allowing people to be ill.
And the great god Sondelius had slain Dean Silva, as Silva had slain Gottlieb, Gottlieb had slain “Encore†Edwards the playful chemist, Edwards had slain Doc Vickerson, and Vickerson had slain the minister’s son who had a real trapeze in his barn.
Dr. Woestijneof Vanderheide’s Grove acted in spare time as Superintendent of Health for Crynssen County, but the office was not well paid and it did not greatly interest him. When Martin burst in and offered to do all the work for half the pay, Woestijne accepted with benevolence, assuring him that it would have a great effect on his private practise.
It did. It almost ruined his private practise.
There was never an official appointment. Martin signed Woestijne’s name (spelling it in various interesting ways, depending on how he felt) to papers, and the Board of County Commissioners recognized Martin’s limited power, but the whole thing was probably illegal.
There was small science and considerably less heroism in his first furies as a health officer, but a great deal of irritation for his fellow-townsmen. He poked into yards, he denounced Mrs. Beeson for her reeking ash-barrels, Mr. Norblom for piling manure on the street, and the schoolboard for the school ventilation and lack of instruction in tooth-brushing. The citizens had formerly been agitated by his irreligion, his moral looseness, and his lack of local patriotism, but when they were prodded out of their comfortable and probably beneficial dirt, they exploded.
Martin was honest and appallingly earnest, but if he had the innocence of the dove he lacked the wisdom of the serpent. He did not make them understand his mission; he scarce tried to make them understand. His authority, as Woestijne’salter ego, was imposing on paper but feeble in action, and it was worthless against the stubbornness which he aroused.
He advanced from garbage-spying to a drama of infection.
The community at Delft had a typhoid epidemic which slackened and continually reappeared. The villagers believed that it came from a tribe of squatters six miles up the creek,and they considered lynching the offenders, as a practical protest and an interesting break in wheat-farming. When Martin insisted that in six miles the creek would purify any waste and that the squatters were probably not the cause, he was amply denounced.
“He’s a fine one, he is, to go around blatting that we’d ought to have more health precautions! Here we go and show him where there’s some hellhounds that ought to be shot, and them only Bohunks anyway, and he doesn’t do a darn’ thing but shoot a lot of hot air about germicidal effect or whatever the fool thing is,†remarked Kaes, the wheat-buyer at the Delft elevator.
Flashing through the county, not neglecting but certainly not enlarging his own practise, Martin mapped every recent case of typhoid within five miles of Delft. He looked into milk-routes and grocery deliveries. He discovered that most of the cases had appeared after the visits of an itinerant seamstress, a spinster virtuous and almost painfully hygienic. She had had typhoid four years before.
“She’s a chronic carrier of the bugs. She’s got to be examined,†he announced.
He found her sewing at the house of an old farmer-preacher.
With modest indignation she refused to be examined, and as he went away she could be heard weeping at the insult, while the preacher cursed him from the doorstep. He returned with the township police officer and had the seamstress arrested and confined in the segregation ward of the county poor-farm. In her discharges he found billions of typhoid bacilli.
The frail and decent body was not comfortable in the board-lined whitewashed ward. She was shamed and frightened. She had always been well beloved, a gentle, shabby, bright-eyed spinster who brought presents to the babies, helped the overworked farmwives to cook dinner, and sang to the children in her thin sparrow voice. Martin was reviled for persecuting her. “He wouldn’t dare pick on her if she wasn’t so poor,†they said, and they talked of a jail-delivery.
Martin fretted. He called upon the seamstress at the poor-farm, he tried to make her understand that there was no other place for her, he brought her magazines and sweets. But he was firm. She could not go free. He was convinced that she had caused at least one hundred cases of typhoid, with nine deaths.
The county derided him. Cause typhoid now, when she had been well for four years? The County Commissioners and the County Board of Health called Dr. Hesselink in from the next county. He agreed with Martin and his maps. Every meeting of the Commissioners was a battle now, and it was uncertain whether Martin would be ruined or throned.
Leora saved him, and the seamstress. “Why not take up a collection to send her off to some big hospital where she can be treated, or where they can keep her if she can’t be cured?†said she.
The seamstress entered a sanitarium—and was amiably forgotten by everybody for the rest of her life—and his recent enemies said of Martin, “He’s mighty smart, and right on the job.†Hesselink drove over to inform him, “You did pretty well this time, Arrowsmith. Glad to see you’re settling down to business.â€
Martin was slightly cocky, and immediately bounded after a fine new epidemic. He was so fortunate as to have a case of small-pox and several which he suspected. Some of these lay across the border in Mencken County, Hesselink’s domain, and Hesselink laughed at him. “It’s probably all chicken-pox, except your one case. Mighty rarely you get small-pox in summer,†he chuckled, while Martin raged up and down the two counties, proclaiming the scourge, imploring every one to be vaccinated, thundering, “There’s going to be all hell let loose here in ten or fifteen days!â€
But the United Brethren parson, who served chapels in Wheatsylvania and two other villages, was an anti-vaccinationist and he preached against it. The villages sided with him. Martin went from house to house, beseeching them, offering to treat them without charge. As he had never taught them to love him and follow him as a leader, they questioned, they argued long and easily on doorsteps, they cackled that he was drunk. Though for weeks his strongest draft had been the acrid coffee of the countryside, they peeped one to another that he was drunk every night, that the United Brethren minister was about to expose him from the pulpit.
And ten dreadful days went by and fifteen, and all but the first case did prove to be chicken-pox. Hesselink gloated and the village roared and Martin was the butt of the land.
He had only a little resented their gossip about his wickedness, only in evenings of slow depression had he meditatedupon fleeing from them, but at their laughter he was black furious.
Leora comforted him with cool hands. “It’ll pass over,†she said. But it did not pass.
By autumn it had become such a burlesque epic as peasants love through all the world. He had, they mirthfully related, declared that anybody who kept hogs would die of small-pox; he had been drunk for a week, and diagnosed everything from gall-stones to heart-burn as small-pox. They greeted him, with no meaning of offense in their snickering, “Got a pimple on my chin, Doc. What is ’t—small-pox?â€
More terrible than their rage is the people’s laughter, and if it rend tyrants, with equal zest it pursues the saint and wise man and befouls their treasure.
When the neighborhood suddenly achieved a real epidemic of diphtheria and Martin shakily preached antitoxin, one-half of them remembered his failure to save Mary Novak and the other half clamored, “Oh, give us a rest! You got epidemics on the brain!†That a number of children quite adequately died did not make them relinquish their comic epic.
Then it was that Martin came home to Leora and said quietly, “I’m licked. I’ve got to get out. Nothing more I can do here. Take years before they’d trust me again. They’re so damnedhumorous! I’m going to go get a real job—public health.â€
“I’m so glad! You’re too good for them here. We’ll find some big place where they’ll appreciate your work.â€
“No, that’s not fair. I’ve learned a little something. I’ve failed here. I’ve antagonized too many people. I didn’t know how to handle them. We could stick it out, and I would, except that life is short and I think I’m a good worker in some ways. Been worrying about being a coward, about running away, ‘turning my—’ What is it? ‘—turning my hand from the plow.’ I don’t care now! By God, I know what I can do! Gottlieb saw it! And I want to get to work. On we go. All right?â€
“Of course!â€
He had read in theJournal of the American Medical Associationthat Gustaf Sondelius was giving a series of lectures atHarvard. He wrote asking whether he knew of a public health appointment. Sondelius answered, in a profane and blotty scrawl, that he remembered with joy their Minneapolis vacation, that he disagreed with Entwisle of Harvard about the nature of metathrombin, that there was an excellent Italian restaurant in Boston, and that he would inquire among his health-official friends as to a position.
Two days later he wrote that Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh, Director of Public Health in the city of Nautilus, Iowa, was looking for a second-in-command, and would probably be willing to send particulars.
Leora and Martin swooped on an almanac.
“Gosh! Sixty-nine thousand people in Nautilus! Against three hundred and sixty-six here—no, wait, it’s three hundred and sixty-seven now, with that new baby of Pete Yeska’s that the dirty swine called in Hesselink for. People! People that can talk! Theaters! Maybe concerts! Leora, we’ll be like a pair of kids let loose from school!â€
He telegraphed for details, to the enormous interest of the station agent, who was also telegraph operator.
The mimeographed form which was sent to him said that Dr. Pickerbaugh required an assistant who would be the only full-time medical officer besides Pickerbaugh himself, as the clinic and school doctors were private physicians working part-time. The assistant would be epidemiologist, bacteriologist, and manager of the office clerks, the nurses, and the lay inspectors of dairies and sanitation. The salary would be twenty-five hundred dollars a year—against the fifteen or sixteen hundred Martin was making in Wheatsylvania.
Proper recommendations were desired.
Martin wrote to Sondelius, to Dad Silva, and to Max Gottlieb, now at the McGurk Institute in New York.
Dr. Pickerbaugh informed him, “I have received very pleasant letters from Dean Silva and Dr. Sondelius about you, but the letter from Dr. Gottlieb is quite remarkable. He says you have rare gifts as a laboratory man. I take great pleasure in offering you the appointment kindly wire.â€
Not till then did Martin completely realize that he was leaving Wheatsylvania—the tedium of Bert Tozer’s nagging—the spying of Pete Yeska and the Norbloms—the inevitability of turning, as so many unchanging times he had turned, south from the Leopolis road at the Two Mile Grove and followingagain that weary, flat, unbending trail—the superiority of Dr. Hesselink and the malice of Dr. Coughlin—the round which left him no time for his dusty laboratory—leaving it all for the achievement and splendor of the great city of Nautilus.
“Leora, we’re going! We’re really going!â€
Bert Tozer said:
“You know by golly there’s folks that would call you a traitor, after all we’ve done for you, even if you did pay back the thousand, to let some other doc come in here and get all that influence away from the Family.â€
Ada Quist said:
“I guess if you ain’t any too popular with the folks around here you’ll have one fine time in a big city like Nautilus! Well Bert and me are going to get married next year and when you two swells make a failure of it I suppose we’ll have to take care of you at our house when you come sneaking back do you think we could get your house at the same rent you paid for it oh Bert why couldn’t we take Mart’s office instead it would save money well I’ve always said since we were in school together you couldn’t stand a decent regular life Ory.â€
Mr. Tozer said:
“I simply can’t understand it, with everything going so nice. Why, you’d be making three-four thousand a year some day, if you just stuck to it. Haven’t we tried to treat you nice? I don’t like to have my little girl go away and leave me alone, now I’m getting on in years. And Bert gets so cranky with me and Mother, but you and Ory would always kind of listen to us. Can’t you fix it somehow so you could stay?â€
Pete Yeska said:
“Doc, you could of knocked me down with a feather when I heard you were going! Course you and me have scrapped about this drug business, but Lord! I been kind of half thinking about coming around some time and offering you a partnership and let you run the drug end to suit yourself, and we could get the Buick agency, maybe, and work up a nice little business. I’m real sorry you’re going to leave us.... Well, come back some day and we’ll take a shot at the ducks, and have a good laugh about that bull you made over the small-pox. I never will forget that! I was saying to the oldwoman just the other day, when she had an ear-ache, ‘Ain’t got small-pox, have yuh, Bess!’â€
Dr. Hesselink said:
“Doctor, what’s this I hear? You’re not going away? Why, you and I were just beginning to bring medical practise in this neck of the woods up to where it ought to be, so I drove over to-night— Huh? We panned you? Ye-es, I suppose we did, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t appreciate you. Small place like here or Groningen, you have to roast your neighbors to keep busy. Why, Doctor, I’ve been watching you develop from an unlicked cub to a real upstanding physician, and now you’re going away—you don’t know how I feel!â€
Henry Novak said:
“Why, Doc, you ain’t going toleaveus? And we got a new baby coming, and I said to the woman, just the other day, ‘It’s a good thing we got a doctor that hands you out the truth and not all this guff we used to get from Doc Winter.’â€
The wheat-buyer at Delft said:
“Doc, what’s this I hear? You ain’t goingaway? A fellow told me you was and I says to him, ‘Don’t be more of a damn’ fool than the Lord meant you to be,’ I says. But I got to worrying about it, and I drove over and— Doc, I fire off my mouth pretty easy, I guess. I was agin you in the typhoid epidemic, when you said that seamstress was carrying the sickness around, and then you showed me up good. Doc, if you’d like to be state senator, and if you’ll stay— I got quite a little influence—believe me, I’ll get out and work my shirt off for you!â€
Alec Ingleblad said:
“You’re a lucky guy!â€
All the village was at the train when they left for Nautilus.
For a hundred autumn-blazing miles Martin mourned his neighbors. “I feel like getting off and going back. Didn’t we used to have fun playing Five Hundred with the Fraziers! I hate to think of the kind of doctor they may get. I swear, if some quack settles there or if Woestijne neglects the health work again, I’ll go back and run ’em both out of business! And be kind of fun to be state senator, some ways.â€
But as evening thickened and nothing in all the rushing world existed save the yellow Pinsch gas globes above them in the long car, they saw ahead of them great Nautilus, high honor and achievement, the making of a radiant model city, and the praise of Sondelius—perhaps even of Max Gottlieb.