Nautiluswas one of the first communities in the country to develop the Weeks habit, now so richly grown that we have Correspondence School Week, Christian Science Week, Osteopathy Week, and Georgia Pine Week.
A Week is not merely a week.
If an aggressive, wide-awake, live-wire, and go-ahead church or chamber of commerce or charity desires to improve itself, which means to get more money, it calls in those few energetic spirits who run any city, and proclaims a Week. This consists of one month of committee meetings, a hundred columns of praise for the organization in the public prints, and finally a day or two on which athletic persons flatter inappreciative audiences in churches or cinema theaters, and the prettiest girls in town have the pleasure of being allowed to talk to male strangers on the street corners, apropos of giving them extremely undecorative tags in exchange for the smallest sums which those strangers think they must pay if they are to be considered gentlemen.
The only variation is the Weeks in which the object is not to acquire money immediately by the sale of tags but by general advertising to get more of it later.
Nautilus had held a Pep Week, during which a race of rapidly talking men, formerly book-agents but now called Efficiency Engineers, went about giving advice to shopkeepers on how to get money away from one another more rapidly, and Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh addressed a prayer-meeting on “The Pep of St. Paul, the First Booster.” It had held a Gladhand Week, when everybody was supposed to speak to at least three strangers daily, to the end that infuriated elderly traveling salesmen were backslapped all day long by hearty and powerful unknown persons. There had also been an Old Home Week, a Write to Mother Week, a We Want Your Factory in Nautilus Week, an Eat More Corn Week, a Go to Church Week, a Salvation Army Week, and an Own Your Own Auto Week.
Perhaps the bonniest of all was Y. Week, to raise eighty thousand dollars for a new Y. M. C. A. building.
On the old building were electric signs, changed daily, announcing “You Must Come Across,” “Young Man Come Along” and “Your Money Creates ’Appiness.” Dr. Pickerbaugh made nineteen addresses in three days, comparing the Y. M. C. A. to the Crusaders, the Apostles, and the expeditions of Dr. Cook—who, he believed, really had discovered the North Pole. Orchid sold three hundred and nineteen Y. tags, seven of them to the same man, who afterward made improper remarks to her. She was rescued by a Y. M. C. A. secretary, who for a considerable time held her hand to calm her.
No organization could rival Almus Pickerbaugh in the invention of Weeks.
He started in January with a Better Babies Week, and a very good Week it was, but so hotly followed by Banish the Booze Week, Tougher Teeth Week, and Stop the Spitter Week that people who lacked his vigor were heard groaning, “My health is being ruined by all this fretting over health.”
During Clean-up Week, Pickerbaugh spread abroad a new lyric of his own composition:
Germs come by stealthAnd ruin health,So listen, pard,Just drop a cardTo some man who’ll clean up your yardAnd that will hit the old germs hard.
Germs come by stealthAnd ruin health,So listen, pard,Just drop a cardTo some man who’ll clean up your yardAnd that will hit the old germs hard.
Germs come by stealthAnd ruin health,So listen, pard,Just drop a cardTo some man who’ll clean up your yardAnd that will hit the old germs hard.
Swat the Fly Week brought him, besides the joy of giving prizes to the children who had slaughtered the most flies, the inspiration for two verses. Posters admonished:
Sell your hammer and buy a horn,But hang onto the old fly-swatter.If you don’t want disease sneaking into the HomeThen to kill the fly you gotter!
Sell your hammer and buy a horn,But hang onto the old fly-swatter.If you don’t want disease sneaking into the HomeThen to kill the fly you gotter!
Sell your hammer and buy a horn,But hang onto the old fly-swatter.If you don’t want disease sneaking into the HomeThen to kill the fly you gotter!
It chanced that the Fraternal Order of Eagles were holding a state convention at Burlington that week, and Pickerbaugh telegraphed to them:
Just mention fly-preventionAt the good old Eagles’ convention.
Just mention fly-preventionAt the good old Eagles’ convention.
Just mention fly-preventionAt the good old Eagles’ convention.
This was quoted in ninety-six newspapers, including one in Alaska, and waving the clippings Pickerbaugh explained to Martin, “Now you see the way a fellow can get the truth across, if he goes at it right.”
Three Cigars a Day Week, which Pickerbaugh invented in midsummer, was not altogether successful, partly because an injudicious humorist on a local newspaper wanted to know whether Dr. Pickerbaugh really expected all babes in arms to smoke as many as three cigars a day, and partly because the cigar-manufacturers came around to the Department of Health with strong remarks about Common Sense. Nor was there thorough satisfaction in Can the Cat and Doctor the Dog Week.
With all his Weeks, Pickerbaugh had time to preside over the Program Committee of the State Convention of Health Officers and Agencies.
It was he who wrote the circular letter sent to all members:
Brother Males and Shemales:Are you coming to the Health Bee? It will be the livest Hop-to-it that this busy lil ole planet has ever see. And it’s going to be Practical. We’ll kiss out on all these glittering generalities and get messages from men as kin talk, so we can lug a think or two (2) home wid us.Luther Botts, the famous community-sing leader, will be there to put Wim an Wigor neverything into the program. John F. Zeisser, M.A., M.D., nall the rest of the alphabet (part your hair Jack and look cute, the ladies sure love you) will unlimber a coupla key-notes. (On your tootsies, fellers, thar she blows!) From time to time, if the brakes hold, we will, or shall in the infinitive, hie oursellufs from wherein we are at to thither, and grab a lunch with Wild Wittles.Do it sound like a good show? It do! Barber, you’re next. Let’s have those cards saying you’re coming.
Brother Males and Shemales:
Are you coming to the Health Bee? It will be the livest Hop-to-it that this busy lil ole planet has ever see. And it’s going to be Practical. We’ll kiss out on all these glittering generalities and get messages from men as kin talk, so we can lug a think or two (2) home wid us.
Luther Botts, the famous community-sing leader, will be there to put Wim an Wigor neverything into the program. John F. Zeisser, M.A., M.D., nall the rest of the alphabet (part your hair Jack and look cute, the ladies sure love you) will unlimber a coupla key-notes. (On your tootsies, fellers, thar she blows!) From time to time, if the brakes hold, we will, or shall in the infinitive, hie oursellufs from wherein we are at to thither, and grab a lunch with Wild Wittles.
Do it sound like a good show? It do! Barber, you’re next. Let’s have those cards saying you’re coming.
This created much enthusiasm and merriment. Dr. Feesons of Clinton wrote to Pickerbaugh:
I figure it was largely due to your snappy come-on letter that we pulled such an attendance and with all modesty I think we may say it was the best health convention ever held in the world. I had to laugh at one old hen, Bostonian or somepun, who was howling that your letter was “undignified”! Can you beat it! I think people as hypercritical and lacking in humor as her should be treated with the dignified contempt they deserve, the damn fool!
I figure it was largely due to your snappy come-on letter that we pulled such an attendance and with all modesty I think we may say it was the best health convention ever held in the world. I had to laugh at one old hen, Bostonian or somepun, who was howling that your letter was “undignified”! Can you beat it! I think people as hypercritical and lacking in humor as her should be treated with the dignified contempt they deserve, the damn fool!
Martin was enthusiastic during Better Babies Week. Leora and he weighed babies, examined them, made out diet charts, and in each child saw the baby they could never have. But when it came to More Babies Week, then he was argumentative. He believed, he said, in birth-control. Pickerbaugh answered with theology, violence, and the example of his own eight beauties.
Martin was equally unconvinced by Anti-Tuberculosis Week. He liked his windows open at night and he disliked men who spat tobacco juice on sidewalks, but he was jarred by hearing these certainly esthetic and possibly hygienic reforms proposed with holy frenzy and bogus statistics.
Any questioning of his fluent figures about tuberculosis, any hint that the cause of decline in the disease may have been natural growth of immunity and not the crusades against spitting and stale air, Pickerbaugh regarded as a criticism of his honesty in making such crusades. He had the personal touchiness of most propagandists; he believed that because he was sincere, therefore his opinions must always be correct. To demand that he be accurate in his statements, to quote Raymond Pearl’s dictum: “As a matter of objective scientific fact, extremely little is known about why the mortality from tuberculosis has declined”—this was to be a scoundrel who really liked to befoul the pavements.
Martin was so alienated that he took an anti-social and probably vicious joy in discovering that though the death-rate in tuberculosis certainly had decreased during Pickerbaugh’s administration in Nautilus, it had decreased at the same rate in most villages of the district, with no speeches about spitting, no Open Your Windows parades.
It was fortunate for Martin that Pickerbaugh did not expect him to take much share in his publicity campaigns but rather to be his substitute in the office during them. They stirred in Martin the most furious and complicated thoughts that had ever afflicted him.
Whenever he hinted criticism, Pickerbaugh answered, “What if my statistics aren’t always exact? What if my advertising, my jollying of the public, does strike some folks as vulgar? It all does good; it’s all on the right side. No matter whatmethods we use, if we can get people to have more fresh air and cleaner yards and less alcohol, we’re justified.”
To himself, a little surprised, Martin put it, “Yes, does it really matter? Does truth matter—clean, cold, unfriendly truth, Max Gottlieb’s truth? Everybody says, ‘Oh, you mustn’t tamper with the truth,’ and everybody is furious if you hint that they themselves are tampering with it. Does anything matter, except making love and sleeping and eating and being flattered?
“I think truth does matter to me, but if it does, isn’t the desire for scientific precision simply my hobby, like another man’s excitement about his golf? Anyway, I’m going to stick by Pickerbaugh.”
To the defense of his chief he was the more impelled by the attitude of Irving Watters and such other physicians as attacked Pickerbaugh because they feared that he really would be successful, and reduce their earnings. But all the while Martin was weary of unchecked statistics.
He estimated that according to Pickerbaugh’s figures on bad teeth, careless motoring, tuberculosis, and seven other afflictions alone, every person in the city had a one hundred and eighty per cent chance of dying before the age of sixteen, and he could not startle with much alarm when Pickerbaugh shouted, “Do you realize that the number of people who died from yaws in Pickens County, Mississippi, last year alone, was twenty-nine and that they might all have been saved, yes, sir,saved, by a daily cold shower?”
For Pickerbaugh had the dreadful habit of cold showers, even in winter, though he might have known that nineteen men between the ages of seventeen and forty-two died of cold showers in twenty-two years in Milwaukee alone.
To Pickerbaugh the existence of “variables,” a word which Martin now used as irritatingly as once he had used “control,” was without significance. That health might be determined by temperature, heredity, profession, soil, natural immunity, or by anything save health-department campaigns for increased washing and morality, was to him inconceivable.
“Variables! Huh!” Pickerbaugh snorted. “Why, every enlightened man in the public serviceknowsenough about the causes of disease—matter now of acting on that knowledge.”
When Martin sought to show that they certainly knew very little about the superiority of fresh air to warmth in schools, about the hygienic dangers of dirty streets, about the realdanger of alcohol, about the value of face-masks in influenza epidemics, about most of the things they tub-thumped in their campaigns, Pickerbaugh merely became angry, and Martin wanted to resign, and saw Irving Watters again, and returned to Pickerbaugh with new zeal, and was in general as agitated and wretched as a young revolutionist discovering the smugness of his leaders.
He came to question what Pickerbaugh called “the proven practical value” of his campaigns as much as the accuracy of Pickerbaugh’s biology. He noted how bored were most of the newspapermen by being galvanized into a new saving of the world once a fortnight, and how incomparably bored was the Man in the Street when the nineteenth pretty girl in twenty days had surged up demanding that he buy a tag to support an association of which he had never heard.
But more dismaying was the slimy trail of the dollar which he beheld in Pickerbaugh’s most ardent eloquence.
When Martin suggested that all milk should be pasteurized, that certain tenements known to be tuberculosis-breeders should be burnt down instead of being fumigated in a fiddling useless way, when he hinted that these attacks would save more lives than ten thousand sermons and ten years of parades by little girls carrying banners and being soaked by the rain, then Pickerbaugh worried, “No, no, Martin, don’t think we could do that. Get so much opposition from the dairymen and the landlords. Can’t accomplish anything in this work unless you keep from offending people.”
When Pickerbaugh addressed a church or the home circle he spoke of “the value of health in making life more joyful,” but when he addressed a business luncheon he changed it to “the value in good round dollars and cents of having workmen who are healthy and sober, and therefore able to work faster at the same wages.” Parents’ associations he enlightened upon “the saving in doctors’ bills of treating the child before maladjustments go too far,” but to physicians he gave assurance that public health agitation would merely make the custom of going regularly to doctors more popular.
To Martin, he spoke of Pasteur, George Washington, Victor Vaughan, and Edison as his masters, but in asking the business men of Nautilus—the Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce, the association of wholesalers—for their divine approval of more funds for his department, he made it clear thatthey were his masters and lords of all the land, and fatly, behind cigars, they accepted their kinghood.
Gradually Martin’s contemplation moved beyond Almus Pickerbaugh to all leaders, of armies or empires, of universities or churches, and he saw that most of them were Pickerbaughs. He preached to himself, as Max Gottlieb had once preached to him, the loyalty of dissent, the faith of being very doubtful, the gospel of not bawling gospels, the wisdom of admitting the probable ignorance of one’s self and of everybody else, and the energetic acceleration of a Movement for going very slow.
A hundred interruptions took Martin out of his laboratory. He was summoned into the reception-room of the department to explain to angry citizens why the garage next door to them should smell of gasoline; he went back to his cubbyhole to dictate letters to school-principals about dental clinics; he drove out to Swede Hollow to see what attention the food and dairy inspector had given to the slaughter-houses; he ordered a family in Shantytown quarantined; and escaped at last into the laboratory.
It was well lighted, convenient, well stocked. Martin had little time for anything but cultures, blood-tests, and Wassermanns for the private physicians of the city, but the work rested him, and now and then he struggled over a precipitation test which was going to replace Wassermanns and make him famous.
Pickerbaugh apparently believed that this research would take six weeks; Martin had hoped to do it in two years; and with the present interruptions it would require two hundred, by which time the Pickerbaughs would have eradicated syphilis and made the test useless.
To Martin’s duties was added the entertainment of Leora in the strange city of Nautilus.
“Do you manage to keep busy all day?” he encouraged her, and, “Any place you’d like to go this evening?”
She looked at him suspiciously. She was as easily and automatically contented by herself as a pussy cat, and he had never before worried about her amusement.
The Pickerbaugh daughters were always popping into Martin’s laboratory. The twins broke test-tubes, and made doll tents out of filter paper. Orchid lettered the special posters for her father’s Weeks, and the laboratory, she said, was the quietest place in which to work. While Martin stood at his bench he was conscious of her, humming at a table in the corner. They talked, tremendously, and he listened with fatuous enthusiasm to opinions which, had Leora produced them, he would have greeted with “That’s a damn’ silly remark!”
He held a clear, claret-red tube of hemolyzed blood up to the light, thinking half of its color and half of Orchid’s ankles as she bent over the table, absurdly patient with her paint-brushes, curling her legs in a fantastic knot.
Abruptly he asked her, “Look here, honey. Suppose you—suppose a kid like you were to fall in love with a married man. What d’you think she ought to do? Be nice to him? Or chuck him?”
“Oh, she ought to chuck him. No matter how much she suffered. Even if she liked him terribly. Because even if she liked him, she oughtn’t to wrong his wife.”
“But suppose the wife never knew, or maybe didn’t care?” He had stopped his pretense of working; he was standing before her, arms akimbo, dark eyes demanding.
“Well, if she didn’t know— But it isn’t that. I believe marriages really and truly are made in Heaven, don’t you? Some day Prince Charming will come, the perfect lover—” She was so young, her lips were so young, so very sweet! “—and of course I want to keep myself for him. It would spoil everything if I made light of love before my Hero came.”
But her smile was caressing.
He pictured them thrown together in a lonely camp. He saw her parroted moralities forgotten. He went through a change as definite as religious conversion or the coming of insane frenzy in war; the change from shamed reluctance to be unfaithful to his wife, to a determination to take what he could get. He began to resent Leora’s demand that she, who had eternally his deepest love, should also demand his every wandering fancy. And she did demand it. She rarely spoke of Orchid, but she could tell (or nervously he thought she could tell) when he had spent an afternoon with the child. Her mute examinationof him made him feel illicit. He who had never been unctuous was profuse and hearty as he urged her, “Been home all day? Well, we’ll just skip out after dinner and take in a movie. Or shall we call up somebody and go see ’em? Whatever you’d like.”
He heard his voice being flowery, and he hated it and knew that Leora was not cajoled. Whenever he drifted into one of his meditations on the superiority of his brand of truth to Pickerbaugh’s, he snarled, “You’re a fine bird to think about truth, you liar!”
He paid, in fact, an enormous price for looking at Orchid’s lips, and no amount of anxiety about the price kept him from looking at them.
In early summer, two months before the outbreak of the Great War in Europe, Leora went to Wheatsylvania for a fortnight with her family. Then she spoke:
“Sandy, I’m not going to ask you any questions when I come back, but I hope you won’t look as foolish as you’ve been looking lately. I don’t think that bachelor’s button, that ragweed, that lady idiot of yours is worth our quarreling. Sandy darling, I do want you to be happy, but unless I up and die on you some day, I’m not going to be hung up like an old cap. I warn you. Now about ice. I’ve left an order for a hundred pounds a week, and if you want to get your own dinners sometimes—”
When she had gone, nothing immediately happened, though a good deal was always about to happen. Orchid had the flapper’s curiosity as to what a man was likely to do, but she was satisfied by exceedingly small thrills.
Martin swore, that morning of June, that she was a fool and a flirt, and he “hadn’t the slightest intention of going near her.” No! He would call on Irving Watters in the evening, or read, or have a walk with the school-clinic dentist.
But at half-past eight he was loitering toward her house.
If the elder Pickerbaughs were there— Martin could hear himself saying, “Thought I’d just drop by, Doctor, and ask you what you thought about—” Hang it! Thought about what? Pickerbaugh never thought about anything.
On the low front steps he could see Orchid. Leaning over her was a boy of twenty, one Charley, a clerk.
“Hello, Father in?” he cried, with a carelessness on which he could but pride himself.
“I’m terribly sorry; he and Mama won’t be back till eleven. Won’t you sit down and cool off a little?”
“Well—” He did sit down, firmly, and tried to make youthful conversation, while Charley produced sentiments suitable, in Charley’s opinion, to the aged Dr. Arrowsmith, and Orchid made little purry interested sounds, an art in which she was very intelligent.
“Been, uh, been seeing many of the baseball games?” said Martin.
“Oh, been getting in all I can,” said Charley. “How’s things going at City Hall? Been nailing a lot of cases of small-pox and winkulus pinkulus and all those fancy diseases?”
“Oh, keep busy,” grunted old Dr. Arrowsmith.
He could think of nothing else. He listened while Charley and Orchid giggled cryptically about things which barred him out and made him feel a hundred years old: references to Mamie and Earl, and a violent “Yeh, that’s all right, but any time you see me dancing with her you just tell me about it, will yuh!” At the corner, Verbena Pickerbaugh was yelping, and observing, “Now you quit!” to persons unknown.
“Hell! It isn’t worth it! I’m going home,” Martin sighed, but at the moment Charley screamed, “Well, ta, ta, be good; gotta toddle along.”
He was left to Orchid and peace and a silence rather embarrassing.
“It’s so nice to be with somebody that has brains and doesn’t always try to flirt, like Charley,” said Orchid.
He considered, “Splendid! She’s going to be just a nice good girl. And I’ve come to my senses. We’ll just have a little chat and I’ll go home.”
She seemed to have moved nearer. She whispered at him, “I was so lonely, especially with that horrid slangy boy, till I heard your step on the walk. I knew it the second I heard it.”
He patted her hand. As his pats were becoming more ardent than might have been expected from the assistant and friend of her father, she withdrew her hand, clasped her knees, and began to chatter.
Always it had been so in the evenings when he had drifted to the porch and found her alone. She was ten times more incalculable than the most complex woman. He managed to feel guilty toward Leora without any of the reputed joys of being guilty.
While she talked he tried to discover whether she had any brains whatever. Apparently she did not have enough to attend a small Midwestern denominational college. Verbena was going to college this autumn, but Orchid, she explained, thought she “ought to stay home and help Mama take care of the chickabiddies.”
“Meaning,” Martin reflected, “that she can’t even pass the Mugford entrance exams!” But his opinion of her intelligence was suddenly enlarged as she whimpered, “Poor little me, prob’ly I’ll always stay here in Nautilus, while you—oh, with your knowledge and your frightfully strong will-power, I know you’re going to conquer the world!”
“Nonsense, I’ll never conquer any world, but I do hope to pull off a few good health measures. Honestly, Orchid honey, do you think I have much will-power?”
The full moon was spacious now behind the maples. The seedy Pickerbaugh domain was enchanted; the tangled grass was a garden of roses, the ragged grape-arbor a shrine to Diana, the old hammock turned to fringed cloth of silver, the bad-tempered and sputtering lawn-sprinkler a fountain, and over all the world was the proper witchery of moonstruck love. The little city, by day as noisy and busy as a pack of children, was stilled and forgotten. Rarely had Martin been inspired to perceive the magic of a perfect hour, so absorbed was he ever in irascible pondering, but now he was caught, and lifted in rapture.
He held Orchid’s quiet hand—and was lonely for Leora.
The belligerent Martin who had carried off Leora had not thought about romance, because in his clumsy way he had been romantic. The Martin who, like a returned warrior scented and enfeebled, yearned toward a girl in the moonlight, now desirously lifted his face to romance and was altogether unromantic.
He felt the duty of making love. He drew her close, but when she sighed, “Oh, please don’t,” there was in him no ruthlessness and no conviction with which to go on. He considered the moonlight again, but also he considered being at the office early in the morning, and he wondered if he could without detection slip out his watch and see what time it was. He managed it. He stooped to kiss her good-night, and somehow didn’t quite kiss her, and found himself walking home.
As he went, he was ruthless and convinced enough regarding himself. He had never, he raged, however stumbling he might have been, expected to find himself a little pilferer of love, a peeping, creeping area-sneak, and not even successful in his sneaking, less successful than the soda-clerks who swanked nightly with the virgins under the maples. He told himself that Orchid was a young woman of no great wisdom, a sigher and drawer-out of her M’s and O’s, but once he was in his lonely flat he longed for her, thought of miraculous and completely idiotic ways of luring her here to-night, and went to bed yearning, “Oh, Orchid—”
Perhaps he had paid too much attention to moonlight and soft summer, for quite suddenly, one day when Orchid came swarming all over the laboratory and perched on the bench with a whisk of stockings, he stalked to her, masterfully seized her wrists, and kissed her as she deserved to be kissed.
He immediately ceased to be masterful. He was frightened. He stared at her wanly. She stared back, shocked, eyes wide, lips uncertain.
“Oh!” she profoundly said.
Then, in a tone of immense interest and some satisfaction:
“Martin—oh—my dear—do you think you ought to have done that?”
He kissed her again. She yielded and for a moment there was nothing in the universe, neither he nor she, neither laboratory nor fathers nor wives nor traditions, but only the intensity of their being together.
Suddenly she babbled, “I know there’s lots of conventional people that would say we’d done wrong, and perhaps I’d have thought so, one time, but— Oh, I’m terribly glad I’m liberal! Of course I wouldn’t hurt dear Leora or do anythingreallywrong for the world, but isn’t it wonderful that with so many bourgeois folks all around, we can rise above them and realize the call that strength makes to strength and— But I’ve simplygotto be at the Y. W. C. A. meeting. There’s a woman lawyer from New York that’s going to tell us about the Modern Woman’s Career.”
When she had gone Martin viewed himself as a successful lover. “I’ve won her,” he gloated.... Probably never has gloating been so shakily and badly done.
That evening, when he was playing poker in his flat withIrving Watters, the school-clinic dentist, and a young doctor from the city clinic, the telephone bell summoned him to an excited but saccharine:
“This is Orchid. Are you glad I called up?”
“Oh, yes, yes, mighty glad you called up.” He tried to make it at once amorously joyful, and impersonal enough to beguile the three coatless, beer-swizzling, grinning doctors.
“Are you doing anything this evening, Marty?”
“Just, uh, couple fellows here for a little game cards.”
“Oh!” It was acute. “Oh, then you— I was such a baby to call you up, but Daddy is away and Verbena and everybody, and it was such a lovely evening, and I just thought—Doyou think I’m an awful little silly?”
“No—no—sure not.”
“I’m so glad you don’t. I’d hate it if I thought you thought I was just a silly to call you up. You don’t, do you?”
“No—no—course not. Look, I’ve got to—”
“I know. I mustn’t keep you. But I just wanted you to tell me whether you thought I was a silly to—”
“No! Honest! Really!”
Three fidgety minutes later, deplorably aware of masculine snickers from behind him, he escaped. The poker-players said all the things considered suitable in Nautilus: “Oh, you little Don Jewen!” and “Can you beat it—his wife only gone for a week!” and “Who is she, Doctor? Go on, you tightwad, bring her up here!” and “Say, I know who it is; it’s that little milliner on Prairie Avenue.”
Next noon she telephoned from a drug store that she had lain awake all night, and on profound contemplation decided that they “mustn’t ever do that sort of thing again”—and would he meet her at the corner of Crimmins Street and Missouri Avenue at eight, so that they might talk it all over?
In the afternoon she telephoned and changed the tryst to half-past eight.
At five she called him up just to remind him—
In the laboratory that day Martin transplanted cultures no more. He was too confusedly human to be a satisfactory experimenter, too coldly thinking to be a satisfactory sinful male, and all the while he longed for the sure solace of Leora.
“I can go as far as I like with her to-night.
“But she’s a brainless man-chaser.
“All the better. I’m tired of being a punk philosopher.
“I wonder if these other lucky lovers that you read about in all this fiction and poetry feel as glum as I do?
“I willnotbe middle-aged and cautious and monogamic and moral! It’s against my religion. I demand the right to be free—
“Hell! These free souls that have to slave at being free are just as bad as their Methodist dads. I have enough sound natural immorality in me so I can afford to be moral. I want to keep my brain clear for work. I don’t want it blurred by dutifully running around trying to kiss everybody I can.
“Orchid is too easy. I hate to give up the right of being a happy sinner, but my way was so straight, with just Leora and my work, and I’m not going to mess it. God help any man that likes his work and his wife! He’s beaten from the beginning.”
He met Orchid at eight-thirty, and the whole matter was unkind. He was equally distasteful of the gallant Martin of two days ago and the prosy cautious Martin of to-night. He went home desolately ascetic, and longed for Orchid all the night.
A week later Leora returned from Wheatsylvania.
He met her at the station.
“It’s all right, “he said. “I feel a hundred and seven years old. I’m a respectable, moral young man, and Lord how I’d hate it, if it wasn’t for my precipitation test and you and—Whydo you always lose your trunk check? I suppose I am a bad example for others, giving up so easily. No, no, darling, can’t yousee; that’s the transportation check the conductor gave you!”
Thissummer Pickerbaugh had shouted and hand-shaken his way through a brief Chautauqua tour in Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas. Martin realized that though he seemed, in contrast to Gustaf Sondelius, an unfortunately articulate and generous lout, he was destined to be ten times better known in America than Sondelius could ever be, a thousand times better known than Max Gottlieb.
He was a correspondent of many of the nickel-plated Great Men whose pictures and sonorous aphorisms appeared in the magazines: the advertising men who wrote little books about Pep and Optimism, the editor of the magazine which told clerks how to become Goethes and Stonewall Jacksons by studying correspondence-courses and never touching the manhood-rotting beer, and the cornfield sage who was equally an authority on finance, peace, biology, editing, Peruvian ethnology, and making oratory pay. These intellectual rulers recognized Pickerbaugh as one of them; they wrote quippish letters to him: and when he answered he signed himself “Pick,” in red pencil.
TheOnward March Magazine, which specialized in biographies of Men Who Have Made Good, had an account of Pickerbaugh among its sketches of the pastor who built his own beautiful Neo-Gothic church out of tin cans, the lady who had in seven years kept 2,698 factory-girls from leading lives of shame, and the Oregon cobbler who had taught himself to read Sanskrit, Finnish, and Esperanto.
“Meet Ol’ Doc Almus Pickerbaugh, a he-man whom Chum Frink has hailed as ‘the two-fisted, fighting poet-doc,’ a scientist who puts his remarkable discoveries right over third base, yet who, as a reg-lar old-fashioned Sunday-school superintendent, rebukes the atheistic so-called scientists that are menacing the foundations of our religion and liberties by their smart-aleck cracks at everything that is noble and improving,” chanted the chronicler.
Martin was reading this article, trying to realize that it was actually exposed in a fabulous New York magazine, with a million circulation, when Pickerbaugh summoned him.
“Mart,” he said, “do you feel competent to run this Department?”
“Why, uh—”
“Do you think you can buck the Interests and keep a clean city all by yourself?”
“Why, uh—”
“Because it looks as if I were going to Washington, as the next congressman from this district!”
“Really?”
“Looks that way. Boy, I’m going to take to the whole nation the Message I’ve tried to ram home here!”
Martin got out quite a good “I congratulate you.” He was so astonished that it sounded fervent. He still had a fragment of his boyhood belief that congressmen were persons of intelligence and importance.
“I’ve just been in conference with some of the leading Republicans of the district. Great surprise to me. Ha, ha, ha! Maybe they picked me because they haven’t anybody else to run this year. Ha, ha, ha!”
Martin also laughed. Pickerbaugh looked as though that was not exactly the right response, but he recovered and caroled on:
“I said to them, ‘Gentlemen, I must warn you that I am not sure I possess the rare qualifications needful in a man who shall have the high privilege of laying down, at Washington, the rules and regulations for the guidance, in every walk of life, of this great nation of a hundred million people. However, gentlemen,’ I said, ‘the impulse that prompts me to consider, in all modesty, your unexpected and probably undeserved honor is the fact that it seems to me that what Congress needs is more forward-looking scientists to plan and more genu-ine trained business men to execute the improvements demanded by our evolving commonwealth, and also the possibility of persuading the Boys there at Washington of the pre-eminent and crying need of a Secretary of Health who shall completely control—’”
But no matter what Martin thought about it, the Republicans really did nominate Pickerbaugh for Congress.
While Pickerbaugh went out campaigning, Martin was in charge of the Department, and he began his reign by getting himself denounced as a tyrant and a radical.
There was no more sanitary and efficient dairy in Iowa than that of old Klopchuk, on the outskirts of Nautilus. It was tiled and drained and excellently lighted; the milking machines were perfect; the bottles were super-boiled; and Klopchuk welcomed inspectors and the tuberculin test. He had fought the dairymen’s union and kept his dairy open-shop by paying more than the union scale. Once, when Martin attended a meeting of the Nautilus Central Labor Council as Pickerbaugh’s representative, the secretary of the council confessed that there was no plant which they would so like to unionize and which they were so unlikely to unionize as Klopchuk’s Dairy.
Now Martin’s labor sympathies were small. Like most laboratory men, he believed that the reason why workmen found less joy in sewing vests or in pulling a lever than he did in a long research was because they were an inferior race, born lazy and wicked. The complaint of the unions was the one thing to convince him that at last he had found perfection.
Often he stopped at Klopchuk’s merely for the satisfaction of it. He noted but one thing which disturbed him: a milker had a persistent sore throat. He examined the man, made cultures, and found hemolytic streptococcus. In a panic he hurried back to the dairy, and after cultures he discovered that there was streptococcus in the udders of three cows.
When Pickerbaugh had saved the health of the nation through all the smaller towns in the congressional district and had returned to Nautilus, Martin insisted on the quarantine of the infected milker and the closing of the Klopchuk Dairy till no more infection should be found.
“Nonsense! Why, that’s the cleanest place in the city,” Pickerbaugh scoffed. “Why borrow trouble? There’s no sign of an epidemic of strep.”
“There darn’ well will be! Three cows infected. Look at what’s happened in Boston and Baltimore, here recently. I’ve asked Klopchuk to come in and talk it over.”
“Well, you know how busy I am, but—”
Klopchuk appeared at eleven, and to Klopchuk the affairwas tragic. Born in a gutter in Poland, starving in New York, working twenty hours a day in Vermont, in Ohio, in Iowa, he had made this beautiful thing, his dairy.
Seamed, drooping, twirling his hat, almost in tears, he protested, “Dr. Pickerbaugh, I do everything the doctors say is necessary. I know dairies! Now comes this young man and he says because one of my men has a cold, I kill little children with diseased milk! I tell you, this is my life, and I would sooner hang myself than send out one drop of bad milk. The young man has some wicked reason. I have asked questions. I find he is a great friend from the Central Labor Council. Why, he go to their meetings! And they want to break me!”
To Martin the trembling old man was pitiful, but he had never before been accused of treachery. He said grimly:
“You can take up the personal charges against me later, Dr. Pickerbaugh. Meantime I suggest you have in some expert to test my results; say Long of Chicago or Brent of Minneapolis or somebody.”
“I— I— I—” The Kipling and Billy Sunday of health looked as distressed as Klopchuk. “I’m sure our friend here doesn’t really mean to make charges against you, Mart. He’s overwrought, naturally. Can’t we just treat the fellow that has the strep infection and not make everybody uncomfortable?”
“All right, if you want a bad epidemic here, toward the end of your campaign!”
“You know cussed well I’d do anything to avoid— Though I want you to distinctly understand it has nothing to do with my campaign for Congress! It’s simply that I owe my city the most scrupulous performance of duty in safeguarding it against disease, and the most fearless enforcement—”
At the end of his oratory Pickerbaugh telegraphed to Dr. J. C. Long, the Chicago bacteriologist.
Dr. Long looked as though he had made the train journey in an ice-box. Martin had never seen a man so free from the poetry and flowing philanthropy of Almus Pickerbaugh. He was slim, precise, lipless, lapless, and eye-glassed, and his hair was parted in the middle. He coolly listened to Martin, coldly listened to Pickerbaugh, icily heard Klopchuk, made his inspection, and reported, “Dr. Arrowsmith seems to know his business perfectly, there is certainly a danger here, I advise closing the dairy, my fee is one hundred dollars, thankyou no I shall not stay to dinner I must catch the evening train.”
Martin went home to Leora snarling, “That man was just as lovable as a cucumber salad, but my God, Lee, with his freedom from bunk, he’s made me wild to get back to research; away from all these humanitarians that are so busy hollering about loving the dear people that they let the people die! I hated him, but— Wonder what Max Gottlieb’s doing this evening? The old German crank! I’ll bet— I’ll bet he’s talking music or something with some terrible highbrow bunch. Wouldn’t you like to see the old coot again? You know, just couple minutes. D’I ever tell you about the time I made the dandy stain of the trypanosomes— Oh, did I?”
He assumed that with the temporary closing of the dairy the matter was ended. He did not understand how hurt was Klopchuk. He knew that Irving Watters, Klopchuk’s physician, was unpleasant when they met, grumbling, “What’s the use going on being an alarmist, Mart?” But he did not know how many persons in Nautilus had been trustily informed that this fellow Arrowsmith was in the pay of labor-union thugs.
Two months before, when Martin had been making his annual inspection of factories, he had encountered Clay Tredgold, the president (by inheritance) of the Steel Windmill Company. He had heard that Tredgold, an elaborate but easy-spoken man of forty-five, moved as one clad in purple on the loftiest planes of Nautilus society. After the inspection Tredgold urged, “Sit down, Doctor; have a cigar and tell me all about sanitation.”
Martin was wary. There was in Tredgold’s affable eye a sardonic flicker.
“What d’you want to know about sanitation?”
“Oh, all about it.”
“The only thing I know is that your men must like you. Of course you haven’t enough wash-bowls in that second-floor toilet room, and the whole lot of ’em swore you were putting in others immediately. If they like you enough to lie against their own interests, you must be a good boss, and I think I’ll let you get away with it—till my next inspection! Well, got to hustle.”
Tredgold beamed on him. “My dear man, I’ve been pullingthat dodge on Pickerbaugh for three years. I’m glad to have seen you. And I think I really may put in some more bowls—just before your next inspection. Good-by!”
After the Klopchuk affair, Martin and Leora encountered Clay Tredgold and that gorgeous slim woman, his wife, in front of a motion-picture theater.
“Give you a lift, Doctor?” cried Tredgold.
On the way he suggested, “I don’t know whether you’re dry, like Pickerbaugh, but if you’d like I’ll run you out to the house and present you with the noblest cocktail conceived since Evangeline County went dry. Does it sound reasonable?”
“I haven’t heard anything so reasonable for years,” said Martin.
The Tredgold house was on the highest knoll (fully twenty feet above the general level of the plain) in Ashford Grove, which is the Back Bay of Nautilus. It was a Colonial structure, with a sun-parlor, a white-paneled hall, and a blue and silver drawing-room. Martin tried to look casual as they were wafted in on Mrs. Tredgold’s chatter, but it was the handsomest house he had ever entered.
While Leora sat on the edge of her chair in the manner of one likely to be sent home, and Mrs. Tredgold sat forward like a hostess, Tredgold flourished the cocktail-shaker and performed courtesies:
“How long you been here now, Doctor?”
“Almost a year.”
“Try that. Look here, it strikes me you’re kind of different from Salvation Pickerbaugh.”
Martin felt that he ought to praise his chief but, to Leora’s gratified amazement, he sprang up and ranted in something like Pickerbaugh’s best manner:
“Gentlemen of the Steel Windmill Industries, than which there is no other that has so largely contributed to the prosperity of our commonwealth, while I realize that you are getting away with every infraction of the health laws that the inspector doesn’t catch you at, yet I desire to pay a tribute to your high respect for sanitation, patriotism, and cocktails, and if I only had an assistant more earnest than young Arrowsmith, I should, with your permission, become President of the United States.”
Tredgold clapped. Mrs. Tredgold asserted, “If that isn’t exactly like Dr. Pickerbaugh!” Leora looked proud, and so did her husband.
“I’m glad you’re free from this socialistic clap-trap of Pickerbaugh’s,” said Tredgold.
The assumption roused something sturdy and defensive in Martin:
“Oh, I don’t care a hang how socialistic he is—whatever that means. Don’t know anything about socialism. But since I’ve gone and given an imitation of him— I suppose it was probably disloyal— I must say I’m not very fond of oratory that’s so full of energy it hasn’t any room for facts. But mind you, Tredgold, it’s partly the fault of people like your Manufacturers’ Association. You encourage him to rant. I’m a laboratory man—or rather, I sometimes wish I were. I like to deal with exact figures.”
“So do I. I was keen on mathematics in Williams,” said Tredgold.
Instantly Martin and he were off on education, damning the universities for turning out graduates like sausages. Martin found himself becoming confidential about “variables,” and Tredgold proclaimed that he had not wanted to take up the ancestral factory, but to specialize in astronomy.
Leora was confessing to the friendly Mrs. Tredgold how cautiously the wife of an assistant director has to economize, and with that caressing voice of hers Mrs. Tredgold comforted, “I know. I was horribly hard-up after Dad died. Have you tried the little Swedish dressmaker on Crimmins Street, two doors from the Catholic church? She’s awfully clever, and so cheap.”
Martin had found, for the first time since marriage, a house in which he was altogether happy; Leora had found, in a woman with the easy smartness which she had always feared and hated, the first woman to whom she could talk of God and the price of toweling. They came out from themselves and were not laughed at.
It was at midnight, when the charms of bacteriology and toweling were becoming pallid, that outside the house sounded a whooping, wheezing motor horn, and in lumbered a ruddy fat man who was introduced as Mr. Schlemihl, president of the Cornbelt Insurance Company of Nautilus.
Even more than Clay Tredgold was he a leader of the Ashford Grove aristocracy, but, while he stood like an invadingbarbarian in the blue and silver room, Schlemihl was cordial:
“Glad meet yuh, Doctor. Well, say, Clay, I’m tickled to death you’ve found another highbrow to gas with. Me, Arrowsmith, I’m simply a poor old insurance salesman. Clay is always telling me what an illiterate boob I am. Look here, Clay darling, do I get a cocktail or don’t I? I seen your lights! I seen you in here telling what a smart guy you are! Come on!Mix!”
Tredgold mixed, extensively. Before he had finished, young Monte Mugford, great-grandson of the sainted but side-whiskered Nathaniel Mugford who had founded Mugford College, also came in, uninvited. He wondered at the presence of Martin, found him human, told him he was human, and did his rather competent best to catch up on the cocktails.
Thus it happened that at three in the morning Martin was singing to a commendatory audience the ballad he had learned from Gustaf Sondelius: