On old Olympus’ topmost topA fat-eared German viewed a hop.
On old Olympus’ topmost topA fat-eared German viewed a hop.
On old Olympus’ topmost topA fat-eared German viewed a hop.
Thus by association with the initial letters they mastered the twelve cranial nerves: olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, and the rest. To the Digams it was the world’s noblest poem, and they remembered it for years after they had become practising physicians and altogether forgotten the names of the nerves themselves.
In Dr. Stout’s anatomy lectures there were no disturbances, but in his dissecting-room were many pleasantries. The mildest of them was the insertion of a fire-cracker in the cadaver on which the two virginal and unhappy co-eds worked. The real excitement during Freshman year was the incident of Clif Clawson and the pancreas.
Clif had been elected class president, for the year, becausehe was so full of greetings. He never met a classmate in the hall of Main Medical without shouting, “How’s your vermiform appendix functioning this morning?” or “I bid thee a lofty greeting, old pediculosis.” With booming decorum he presided at class meetings (indignant meetings to denounce the proposal to let the “aggies” use the North Side Tennis Courts), but in private life he was less decorous.
The terrible thing happened when the Board of Regents were being shown through the campus. The Regents were the supreme rulers of the University; they were bankers and manufacturers and pastors of large churches; to them even the president was humble. Nothing gave them more interesting thrills than the dissecting-room of the medical school. The preachers spoke morally of the effect of alcohol on paupers, and the bankers of the disrespect for savings-accounts which is always to be seen in the kind of men who insist on becoming cadavers. In the midst of the tour, led by Dr. Stout and the umbrella-carrying secretary of the University, the plumpest and most educational of all the bankers stopped near Clif Clawson’s dissecting-table, with his derby hat reverently held behind him, and into that hat Clif dropped a pancreas.
Now a pancreas is a damp and disgusting thing to find in your new hat, and when the banker did so find one, he threw down the hat and said that the students of Winnemac had gone to the devil. Dr. Stout and the secretary comforted him; they cleaned the derby and assured him that vengeance should be done on the man who could put a pancreas in a banker’s hat.
Dr. Stout summoned Clif, as president of the Freshmen. Clif was pained. He assembled the class, he lamented that any Winnemac Man could place a pancreas in a banker’s hat, and he demanded that the criminal be manly enough to stand up and confess.
Unfortunately the Reverend Ira Hinkley, who sat between Martin and Angus Duer, had seen Clif drop the pancreas. He growled, “This is outrageous! I’m going to expose Clawson, even if he is a frat-brother of mine.”
Martin protested, “Cut it out. You don’t want to get him fired?”
“He ought to be!”
Angus Duer turned in his seat, looked at Ira, and suggested,“Will you kindly shut up?” and, as Ira subsided, Angus became to Martin more admirable and more hateful than ever.
When he was depressed by a wonder as to why he was here, listening to a Professor Robertshaw, repeating verses about fat-eared Germans, learning the trade of medicine like Fatty Pfaff or Irving Watters, then Martin had relief in what he considered debauches. Actually they were extremely small debauches; they rarely went beyond too much lager in the adjacent city of Zenith, or the smiles of a factory girl parading the sordid back avenues, but to Martin, with his pride in taut strength, his joy in a clear brain, they afterward seemed tragic.
His safest companion was Clif Clawson. No matter how much bad beer he drank, Clif was never much more intoxicated than in his normal state. Martin sank or rose to Clif’s buoyancy, while Clif rose or sank to Martin’s speculativeness. As they sat in a back-room, at a table glistening with beer-glass rings, Clif shook his finger and babbled, “You’re only one ’at gets me, Mart. You know with all the hell-raising, and all the talk about bein’ c’mmercial that I pull on these high boys like Ira Stinkley, I’m jus’ sick o’ c’mmerialism an’ bunk as you are.”
“Sure. You bet,” Martin agreed with alcoholic fondness. “You’re jus’ like me. My God, do you get it—dough-face like Irving Watters or heartless climber like Angus Duer, and then old Gottlieb! Ideal of research! Never bein’ content with whatseemstrue! Alone, not carin’ a damn, square-toed as a captain on the bridge, working all night, getting to the bottom of things!”
“Thash stuff. That’s my idee, too. Lez have ’nother beer. Shake you for it!” observed Clif Clawson.
Zenith, with its saloons, was fifteen miles from Mohalis and the University of Winnemac; half an hour by the huge, roaring, steel interurban trolleys, and to Zenith the medical students went for their forays. To say that one had “gone into town last night” was a matter for winks and leers. But with Angus Duer, Martin discovered a new Zenith.
At supper Duer said abruptly, “Come into town with me and hear a concert.”
For all his fancied superiority to the class, Martin was illimitably ignorant of literature, of painting, of music. That the bloodless and acquisitive Angus Duer should waste time listening to fiddlers was astounding to him. He discovered that Duer had enthusiasm for two composers, called Bach and Beethoven, presumably Germans, and that he himself did not yet comprehend all the ways of the world. On the interurban, Duer’s gravity loosened, and he cried, “Boy, if I hadn’t been born to carve up innards, I’d have been a great musician! To-night I’m going to lead you right into Heaven!”
Martin found himself in a confusion of little chairs and vast gilded arches, of polite but disapproving ladies with programs in their laps, unromantic musicians making unpleasant noises below and, at last, incomprehensible beauty, which made for him pictures of hills and deep forests, then suddenly became achingly long-winded. He exulted, “I’m going to have ’em all—the fame of Max Gottlieb— I mean his ability—and the lovely music and lovely women— Golly! I’m going to do big things. And see the world.... Will this piece never quit?”
It was a week after the concert that he rediscovered Madeline Fox.
Madeline was a handsome, high-colored, high-spirited, opinionated girl whom Martin had known in college. She was staying on, ostensibly to take a graduate course in English, actually to avoid going back home. She considered herself a superb tennis player; she played it with energy and voluble swoopings and large lack of direction. She believed herself to be a connoisseur of literature; the fortunates to whom she gave her approval were Hardy, Meredith, Howells, and Thackeray, none of whom she had read for five years. She had often reproved Martin for his inappreciation of Howells, for wearing flannel shirts, and for his failure to hand her down from street-cars in the manner of a fiction hero. In college, they had gone to dances together, though as a dancer Martin was more spirited than accurate, and his partners sometimes had difficulty in deciding just what he was trying to dance. He liked Madeline’s tall comeliness and her vigor; he felt that with her energetic culture she was somehow “good for him.” During this year, he had scarcely seen her. He thought of her late in the evenings, and planned to telephone to her, and did not telephone. But as he became doubtful about medicine he longed for her sympathy, and on a Sunday afternoon of spring he took her for a walk along the Chaloosa River.
From the river bluffs the prairie stretches in exuberant rolling hills. In the long barley fields, the rough pastures, the stunted oaks and brilliant birches, there is the adventurousness of the frontier, and like young plainsmen they tramped the bluffs and told each other they were going to conquer the world.
He complained, “These damn’ medics—”
“Oh, Martin, do you think ‘damn’ is a nice word?” said Madeline.
He did think it was a very nice word indeed, and constantly useful to a busy worker, but her smile was desirable.
“Well—these darn’ studes, they aren’t trying to learn science; they’re simply learning a trade. They just want to get the knowledge that’ll enable them to cash in. They don’t talk about saving lives but about ‘losing cases’—losing dollars! And they wouldn’t even mind losing cases if it was a sensational operation that’d advertise ’em! They make me sick! How many of ’em do you find that’re interested in the work Ehrlich is doing in Germany—yes, or that Max Gottlieb is doing right here and now! Gottlieb’s just taken an awful fall out of Wright’s opsonin theory.”
“Has he, really?”
“Hashe! I should say he had! And do you get any of the medics stirred up about it? You do not! They say, ‘Oh, sure, science is all right in its way; helps a doc to treat his patients,’ and then they begin to argue about whether they can make more money if they locate in a big city or a town, and is it better for a young doc to play the good-fellow and lodge game, or join the church and look earnest. You ought to hear Irve Watters. He’s just got one idea: the fellow that gets ahead in medicine, is he the lad that knows his pathology? Oh, no; the bird that succeeds is the one that gets an office on a northeast corner, near a trolley car junction, with a ’phone number that’ll be easy for patients to remember! Honest! He said so! I swear, when I graduate I believe I’ll be a ship’s doctor. You see the world that way, and at least you aren’t racing up and down the boat tryingto drag patients away from some rival doc that has an office on another deck!”
“Yes, I know; it’s dreadful the way people don’t have ideals about their work. So many of the English grad students just want to make money teaching, instead of enjoying scholarship the way I do.”
It was disconcerting to Martin that she should seem to think that she was a superior person quite as much as himself, but he was even more disconcerted when she bubbled:
“At the same time, Martin, one does have to be practical, doesn’t one! Think how much more money—no, I mean how much more social position and power for doing good a successful doctor has than one of these scientists that just putter, and don’t know what’s going on in the world. Look at a surgeon like Dr. Loizeau, riding up to the hospital in a lovely car with a chauffeur in uniform, and all his patients simply worshiping him, and then your Max Gottlieb—somebody pointed him out to me the other day, and he had on a dreadful old suit, and I certainly thought he could stand a hair-cut.”
Martin turned on her with fury, statistics, vituperation, religious zeal, and confused metaphors. They sat on a crooked old-fashioned rail-fence where over the sun-soaked bright plantains the first insects of spring were humming. In the storm of his fanaticism she lost her airy Culture and squeaked, “Yes, I see now, I see,” without stating what it was she saw. “Oh, you do have a fine mind and such fine—such integrity.”
“Honest? Do you think I have?”
“Oh, indeed I do, and I’m sure you’re going to have a wonderful future. And I’m so glad you aren’t commercial, like the others. Don’t mind what they say!”
He noted that Madeline was not only a rare and understanding spirit but also an extraordinarily desirable woman—fresh color, tender eyes, adorable slope from shoulder to side. As they walked back, he perceived that she was incredibly the right mate for him. Under his training she would learn the distinction between vague “ideals” and the hard sureness of science. They paused on the bluff, looking down at the muddy Chaloosa, a springtime Western river wild with floating branches. He yearned for her; he regretted the casual affairs of a student and determined to be a pure and extremely industrious young man, to be, in fact, “worthy of her.”
“Oh, Madeline,” he mourned, “you’re so darn’ lovely!”
She glanced at him, timidly.
He caught her hand; in a desperate burst he tried to kiss her. It was very badly done. He managed only to kiss the point of her jaw, while she struggled and begged, “Oh, don’t!” They did not acknowledge, as they ambled back into Mohalis, that the incident had occurred, but there was softness in their voices and without impatience now she heard his denunciation of Professor Robertshaw as a phonograph, and he listened to her remarks on the shallowness and vulgarity of Dr. Norman Brumfit, that sprightly English instructor. At her boarding-house she sighed, “I wish I could ask you to come in, but it’s almost suppertime and— Will you call me up some day?”
“You bet I will!” said Martin, according to the rules for amorous discourse in the University of Winnemac.
He raced home in adoration. As he lay in his narrow upper bunk at midnight, he saw her eyes, now impertinent, now reproving, now warm with trust in him. “I love her! Iloveher! I’ll phone her— Wonder if I dare call her up as early as eight in the morning?”
But at eight he was too busy studying the lacrimal apparatus to think of ladies’ eyes. He saw Madeline only once, and in the publicity of her boarding-house porch, crowded with co-eds, red cushions, and marshmallows, before he was hurled into hectic studying for the year’s final examinations.
At examination-time, Digamma Pi fraternity showed its value to urgent seekers after wisdom. Generations of Digams had collected test-papers and preserved them in the sacred Quiz Book; geniuses for detail had labored through the volume and marked with red pencil the problems most often set in the course of years. The Freshmen crouched in a ring about Ira Hinkley in the Digam living-room, while he read out the questions they were most likely to get. They writhed, clawed their hair, scratched their chins, bit their fingers, and beat their temples in the endeavor to give the right answer before Angus Duer should read it to them out of the textbook.
In the midst of their sufferings they had to labor with Fatty Pfaff.
Fatty had failed in the mid-year anatomical, and he hadto pass a special quiz before he could take the finals. There was a certain fondness for him in Digamma Pi; Fatty was soft, Fatty was superstitious, Fatty was an imbecile, yet they had for him the annoyed affection they might have had for a second-hand motor or a muddy dog. All of them worked on him; they tried to lift him and thrust him through the examination as through a trap-door. They panted and grunted and moaned at the labor, and Fatty panted and moaned with them.
The night before his special examination they kept him at it till two, with wet towels, black coffee, prayer, and profanity. They repeated lists—lists—lists to him; they shook their fists in his mournful red round face and howled, “Damn you,willyou remember that the bicuspid valve is the SAME as the mitral valve and NOT another one?” They ran about the room, holding up their hands and wailing, “Won’t he never remember nothing about nothing?” and charged back to purr with fictive calm, “Now no use getting fussed, Fatty. Take it easy. Just listen to this, quietly, will yuh, and try,” coaxingly, “do try to rememberonething, anyway!”
They led him carefully to bed. He was so filled with facts that the slightest jostling would have spilled them.
When he awoke at seven, with red eyes and trembling lips, he had forgotten everything he had learned.
“There’s nothing for it,” said the president of Digamma Pi. “He’s got to have a crib, and take his chance on getting caught with it. I thought so. I made one out for him yesterday. It’s a lulu. It’ll cover enough of the questions so he’ll get through.”
Even the Reverend Ira Hinkley, since he had witnessed the horrors of the midnight before, went his ways ignoring the crime. It was Fatty himself who protested: “Gee, I don’t like to cheat. I don’t think a fellow that can’t get through an examination had hardly ought to be allowed to practise medicine. That’s what my Dad said.”
They poured more coffee into him and (on the advice of Clif Clawson, who wasn’t exactly sure what the effect might be but who was willing to learn) they fed him a potassium bromide tablet. The president of Digamma, seizing Fatty with some firmness, growled, “I’m going to stick this crib in your pocket—look, here in your breast pocket, behind your handkerchief.”
“I won’t use it. I don’t care if I fail,” whimpered Fatty.
“That’s all right, but you keep it there. Maybe you can absorb a little information from it through your lungs, for God knows—” The president clenched his hair. His voice rose, and in it was all the tragedy of night watches and black draughts and hopeless retreats. “— God knows you can’t take it in through your head!”
They dusted Fatty, they stood him right side up, and pushed him through the door, on his way to Anatomy Building. They watched him go: a balloon on legs, a sausage in corduroy trousers.
“Is it possible he’s going to be honest?” marveled Clif Clawson.
“Well, if he is, we better go up and begin packing his trunk. And this ole frat’ll never have another goat like Fatty,” grieved the president.
They saw Fatty stop, remove his handkerchief, mournfully blow his nose—and discover a long thin slip of paper. They saw him frown at it, tap it on his knuckles, begin to read it, stuff it back into his pocket, and go on with a more resolute step.
They danced hand in hand about the living-room of the fraternity, piously assuring one another, “He’ll use it—it’s all right—he’ll get through or get hanged!”
He got through.
Digamma Pi was more annoyed by Martin’s restless doubtings than by Fatty’s idiocy, Clif Clawson’s raucousness, Angus Duer’s rasping, or the Reverend Ira Hinkley’s nagging.
During the strain of study for examinations Martin was peculiarly vexing in regard to “laying in the best quality medical terms like the best quality sterilizers—not for use but to impress your patients.” As one, the Digams suggested, “Say, if you don’t like the way we study medicine, we’ll be tickled to death to take up a collection and send you back to Elk Mills, where you won’t be disturbed by all us lowbrows and commercialists. Look here! We don’t tell you how you ought to work. Where do you get the idea you got to tell us? Oh, turn it off, will you!”
Angus Duer observed, with sour sweetness, “We’ll admit we’resimply carpenters, and you’re a great investigator. But there’s several things you might turn to when you finish science. What do you know about architecture? How’s your French verbs? How many big novels have you ever read? Who’s the premier of Austro-Hungary?”
Martin struggled, “I don’t pretend to know anything—except I do know what a man like Max Gottlieb means. He’s got the right method, and all these other hams of profs, they’re simply witch doctors. You think Gottlieb isn’t religious, Hinkley. Why, his just being in a lab is a prayer. Don’t you idiots realize what it means to have a man like that here, making new concepts of life? Don’t you—”
Clif Clawson, with a chasm of yawning, speculated, “Praying in the lab! I’ll bet I get the pants took off me, when I take bacteriology, if Pa Gottlieb catches me praying during experiment hours!”
“Damn it, listen!” Martin wailed. “I tell you, you fellows are the kind that keep medicine nothing but guess-work diagnosis, and here you have a man—”
So they argued for hours, after their sweaty fact-grinding.
When the others had gone to bed, when the room was a muck-heap of flung clothing and weary young men snoring in iron bunks, Martin sat at the splintery long pine study-table, worrying. Angus Duer glided in, demanding, “Look here, old son. We’re all sick of your crabbing. If you think medicine is rot, the way we study it, and if you’re so confoundedly honest, why don’t you get out?”
He left Martin to agonize, “He’s right. I’ve got to shut up or get out. Do I really mean it? WhatdoI want? WhatamI going to do?”
Angus Duer’s studiousness and his reverence for correct manners were alike offended by Clif’s bawdy singing, Clif’s howling conversation, Clif’s fondness for dropping things in people’s soup, and Clif’s melancholy inability to keep his hands washed. For all his appearance of nerveless steadiness, during the tension of examination-time Duer was as nervous as Martin, and one evening at supper, when Clif was bellowing, Duer snapped, “Will you kindly not make so much racket?”
“I’ll make all the damn’ racket I damn’ please!” Clif asserted, and a feud was on.
Clif was so noisy thereafter that he almost became tired of his own noise. He was noisy in the living-room, he was noisy in the bath, and with some sacrifice he lay awake pretending to snore. If Duer was quiet and book-wrapped, he was not in the least timid; he faced Clif with the eye of a magistrate, and cowed him. Privily Clif complained to Martin, “Darn him, he acts like I was a worm. Either he or me has got to get out of Digam, that’s a cinch, and it won’t be me!”
He was ferocious and very noisy about it, and it was he who got out. He said that the Digams were a “bunch of bum sports; don’t even have a decent game of poker,” but he was fleeing from the hard eyes of Angus Duer. And Martin resigned from the fraternity with him, planned to room with him the coming autumn.
Clif’s blustering rubbed Martin as it did Duer. Clif had no reticences; when he was not telling slimy stories he was demanding, “How much chuh pay for those shoes—must think you’re a Vanderbilt!” or “D’I see you walking with that Madeline Fox femme—what chuh tryin’ to do?” But Martin was alienated from the civilized, industrious, nice young men of Digamma Pi, in whose faces he could already see prescriptions, glossy white sterilizers, smart enclosed motors, and glass office-signs in the best gilt lettering. He preferred a barbarian loneliness, for next year he would be working with Max Gottlieb, and he could not be bothered.
That summer he spent with a crew installing telephones in Montana.
He was a lineman in the wire-gang. It was his job to climb the poles, digging the spurs of his leg-irons into the soft and silvery pine, to carry up the wire, lash it to the glass insulators, then down and to another pole.
They made perhaps five miles a day; at night they drove into little rickety wooden towns. Their retiring was simple—they removed their shoes and rolled up in a horse-blanket. Martin wore overalls and a flannel shirt. He looked like a farm-hand. Climbing all day long, he breathed deep, his eyes cleared of worry, and one day he experienced a miracle.
He was atop a pole and suddenly, for no clear cause, his eyesopened and he saw; as though he had just awakened he saw that the prairie was vast, that the sun was kindly on rough pasture and ripening wheat, on the old horses, the easy, broad-beamed, friendly horses, and on his red-faced jocose companions; he saw that the meadow larks were jubilant, and blackbirds shining by little pools, and with the living sun all life was living. Suppose the Angus Duers and Irving Watterses were tight tradesmen. What of it? “I’mhere!” he gloated.
The wire-gang were as healthy and as simple as the west wind; they had no pretentiousness; though they handled electrical equipment they did not, like medics, learn a confusion of scientific terms and pretend to the farmers that they were scientists. They laughed easily and were content to be themselves, and with them Martin was content to forget how noble he was. He had for them an affection such as he had for no one at the University save Max Gottlieb.
He carried in his bag one book, Gottlieb’s “Immunology.” He could often get through half a page of it before he bogged down in chemical formulæ. Occasionally, on Sundays or rainy days, he tried to read it, and longed for the laboratory; occasionally he thought of Madeline Fox, and became certain that he was devastatingly lonely for her. But week slipped into careless and robust week, and when he awoke in a stable, smelling the sweet hay and the horses and the lark-ringing prairie that crept near to the heart of these shanty towns, he cared only for the day’s work, the day’s hiking, westward toward the sunset.
So they straggled through the Montana wheatland, whole duchies of wheat in one shining field, through the cattle-country and the sagebrush desert, and suddenly, staring at a persistent cloud, Martin realized that he beheld the mountains.
Then he was on a train; the wire-gang were already forgotten; and he was thinking only of Madeline Fox, Clif Clawson, Angus Duer, and Max Gottlieb.
Professor Max Gottliebwas about to assassinate a guinea pig with anthrax germs, and the bacteriology class were nervous.
They had studied the forms of bacteria, they had handled Petri dishes and platinum loops, they had proudly grown on potato slices the harmless red cultures ofBacillus prodigiosus, and they had come now to pathogenic germs and the inoculation of a living animal with swift disease. These two beady-eyed guinea pigs, chittering in a battery jar, would in two days be stiff and dead.
Martin had an excitement not free from anxiety. He laughed at it, he remembered with professional scorn how foolish were the lay visitors to the laboratory, who believed that sanguinary microbes would leap upon them from the mysterious centrifuge, from the benches, from the air itself. But he was conscious that in the cotton-plugged test-tube between the instrument-bath and the bichloride jar on the demonstrator’s desk were millions of fatal anthrax germs.
The class looked respectful and did not stand too close. With the flair of technique, the sure rapidity which dignified the slightest movement of his hands, Dr. Gottlieb clipped the hair on the belly of a guinea pig held by the assistant. He soaped the belly with one flicker of a hand-brush, he shaved it and painted it with iodine.
(And all the while Max Gottlieb was recalling the eagerness of his first students, when he had just returned from working with Koch and Pasteur, when he was fresh from enormous beer seidels and Korpsbrüder and ferocious arguments. Passionate, beautiful days!Die goldene Zeit!His first classes in America, at Queen City College, had been awed by the sensational discoveries in bacteriology; they had crowded about him reverently; they had longed to know. Now the class was a mob. He looked at them— Fatty Pfaff in the front row, his face vacant as a doorknob; the co-eds emotional and frightened; only Martin Arrowsmith and Angus Duer visibly intelligent. His memory fumbled for a pale blue twilight in Munich, a bridge and a waiting girl, and the sound of music.)
He dipped his hands in the bichloride solution and shook them—a quick shake, fingers down, like the fingers of a pianist above the keys. He took a hypodermic needle from the instrument-bath and lifted the test-tube. His voice flowed indolently, with German vowels and blurred W’s:
“This, gentlemen, iss a twenty-four-hour culture ofBacillus anthracis. You will note, I am sure you will have noted already, that in the bottom of the tumbler there was cotton to keep the tube from being broken. I cannot advise breaking tubes of anthrax germs and afterwards getting the hands into the culture. Youmightmerely get anthrax boils—”
The class shuddered.
Gottlieb twitched out the cotton plug with his little finger, so neatly that the medical students who had complained, “Bacteriology is junk; urinalysis and blood tests are all the lab stuff we need to know,” now gave him something of the respect they had for a man who could do card tricks or remove an appendix in seven minutes. He agitated the mouth of the tube in the Bunsen burner, droning, “Every time you take the plug from a tube, flame the mouth of the tube. Make that a rule. It is a necessity of the technique, and technique, gentlemen, is the beginning of all science. It iss also the least-known thing in science.”
The class was impatient. Why didn’t he get on with it, on to the entertainingly dreadful moment of inoculating the pig?
(And Max Gottlieb, glancing at the other guinea pig in the prison of its battery jar, meditated, “Wretched innocent! Why should I murder him, to teachDummköpfe? It would be better to experiment on that fat young man.”)
He thrust the syringe into the tube, he withdrew the piston dextrously with his index finger, and lectured:
“Take one half c.c. of the culture. There are two kinds of M.D.’s—those to whom c.c. means cubic centimeter and those to whom it means compound cathartic. The second kind are more prosperous.”
(But one cannot convey the quality of it: the thin drawl, the sardonic amiability, the hiss of the S’s, the D’s turned into blunt and challenging T’s.)
The assistant held the guinea pig close; Gottlieb pinched upthe skin of the belly and punctured it with a quick down thrust of the hypodermic needle. The pig gave a little jerk, a little squeak, and the co-eds shuddered. Gottlieb’s wise fingers knew when the peritoneal wall was reached. He pushed home the plunger of the syringe. He said quietly, “This poor animal will now soon be dead as Moses.” The class glanced at one another uneasily. “Some of you will think that it does not matter; some of you will think, like Bernard Shaw, that I am an executioner and the more monstrous because I am cool about it; and some of you will not think at all. This difference in philosophy iss what makes life interesting.”
While the assistant tagged the pig with a tin disk in its ear and restored it to the battery jar, Gottlieb set down its weight in a note-book, with the time of inoculation and the age of the bacterial culture. These notes he reproduced on the blackboard, in his fastidious script, murmuring, “Gentlemen, the most important part of living is not the living but pondering upon it. And the most important part of experimentation is not doing the experiment but making notes, ve-ry accuratequantitativenotes—in ink. I am told that a great many clever people feel they can keep notes in their heads. I have often observed with pleasure that such persons do not have heads in which to keep their notes. This iss very good, because thus the world never sees their results and science is not encumbered with them. I shall now inoculate the second guinea pig, and the class will be dismissed. Before the next lab hour I shall be glad if you will read Pater’s ‘Marius the Epicurean,’ to derife from it the calmness which is the secret of laboratory skill.”
As they bustled down the hall, Angus Duer observed to a brother Digam, “Gottlieb is an old laboratory plug; he hasn’t got any imagination; he sticks here instead of getting out into the world and enjoying the fight. But he certainly is handy. Awfully good technique. He might have been a first-rate surgeon, and made fifty thousand dollars a year. As it is, I don’t suppose he gets a cent over four thousand!”
Ira Hinkley walked alone, worrying. He was an extraordinarily kindly man, this huge and bumbling parson. He reverently accepted everything, no matter how contradictory to everything else, that his medical instructors told him, but thiskilling of animals—he hated it. By a connection not evident to him he remembered that the Sunday before, in the slummy chapel where he preached during his medical course, he had exalted the sacrifice of the martyrs and they had sung of the blood of the lamb, the fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel’s veins, but this meditation he lost, and he lumbered toward Digamma Pi in a fog of pondering pity.
Clif Clawson, walking with Fatty Pfaff, shouted, “Gosh, ole pig certainly did jerk when Pa Gottlieb rammed that needle home!” and Fatty begged, “Don’t! Please!”
But Martin Arrowsmith saw himself doing the same experiment and, as he remembered Gottlieb’s unerring fingers, his hands curved in imitation.
The guinea pigs grew drowsier and drowsier. In two days they rolled over, kicked convulsively, and died. Full of dramatic expectation, the class reassembled for the necropsy. On the demonstrator’s table was a wooden tray, scarred from the tacks which for years had pinned down the corpses. The guinea pigs were in a glass jar, rigid, their hair ruffled. The class tried to remember how nibbling and alive they had been. The assistant stretched out one of them with thumb-tacks. Gottlieb swabbed its belly with a cotton wad soaked in lysol, slit it from belly to neck, and cauterized the heart with a red-hot spatula—the class quivered as they heard the searing of the flesh. Like a priest of diabolic mysteries, he drew out the blackened blood with a pipette. With the distended lungs, the spleen and kidneys and liver, the assistant made wavy smears on glass slides which were stained and given to the class for examination. The students who had learned to look through the microscope without having to close one eye were proud and professional, and all of them talked of the beauty of identifying the bacillus, as they twiddled the brass thumbscrews to the right focus and the cells rose from cloudiness to sharp distinctness on the slides before them. But they were uneasy, for Gottlieb remained with them that day, stalking behind them, saying nothing, watching them always, watching the disposal of the remains of the guinea pigs, and along the benches ran nervous rumors about a bygone student who had died from anthrax infection in the laboratory.
There was for Martin in these days a quality of satisfying delight; the zest of a fast hockey game, the serenity of the prairie, the bewilderment of great music, and a feeling of creation. He woke early and thought contentedly of the day; he hurried to his work, devout, unseeing.
The confusion of the bacteriological laboratory was ecstasy to him—the students in shirt-sleeves, filtering nutrient gelatine, their fingers gummed from the crinkly gelatine leaves; or heating media in an autoclave like a silver howitzer. The roaring Bunsen flames beneath the hot-air ovens, the steam from the Arnold sterilizers rolling to the rafters, clouding the windows, were to Martin lovely with activity, and to him the most radiant things in the world were rows of test-tubes filled with watery serum and plugged with cotton singed to a coffee brown, a fine platinum loop leaning in a shiny test-glass, a fantastic hedge of tall glass tubes mysteriously connecting jars, or a bottle rich with gentian violet stain.
He had begun, perhaps in youthful imitation of Gottlieb, to work by himself in the laboratory at night.... The long room was dark, thick dark, but for the gas-mantle behind his microscope. The cone of light cast a gloss on the bright brass tube, a sheen on his black hair, as he bent over the eyepiece. He was studying trypanosomes from a rat—an eight-branched rosette stained with polychrome methylene blue; a cluster of organisms delicate as a narcissus, with their purple nuclei, their light blue cells, and the thin lines of the flagella. He was excited and a little proud; he had stained the germs perfectly, and it is not easy to stain a rosette without breaking the petal shape. In the darkness, a step, the weary step of Max Gottlieb, and a hand on Martin’s shoulder. Silently Martin raised his head, pushed the microscope toward him. Bending down, a cigarette stub in his mouth—the smoke would have stung the eyes of any human being— Gottlieb peered at the preparation.
He adjusted the gas light a quarter inch, and mused, “Splendid! You have craftsmanship. Oh, there is an art in science—for a few. You Americans, so many of you—all full with ideas, but you are impatient with the beautiful dullness of long labors. I see already—and I watch you in the lab before—perhaps you may try the trypanosomes of sleeping sickness. They are very, very interesting, and very, very tickelish to handle. It is quitea nice disease. In some villages in Africa, fifty per cent. of the people have it, and it is invariably fatal. Yes, I think you might work on the bugs.”
Which, to Martin, was getting his brigade in battle.
“I shall have,” said Gottlieb, “a little sandwich in my room at midnight. If you should happen to work so late, I should be very pleast if you would come to have a bite.”
Diffidently, Martin crossed the hall to Gottlieb’s immaculate laboratory at midnight. On the bench were coffee and sandwiches, curiously small and excellent sandwiches, foreign to Martin’s lunch-room taste.
Gottlieb talked till Clif had faded from existence and Angus Duer seemed but an absurd climber. He summoned forth London laboratories, dinners on frosty evenings in Stockholm, walks on the Pincio with sunset behind the dome of San Pietro, extreme danger and overpowering disgust from excreta-smeared garments in an epidemic at Marseilles. His reserve slipped from him and he talked of himself and of his family as though Martin were a contemporary.
The cousin who was a colonel in Uruguay and the cousin, a rabbi, who was tortured in a pogrom in Moscow. His sick wife—it might be cancer. The three children—the youngest girl, Miriam, she was a good musician, but the boy, the fourteen-year-old, he was a worry; he was saucy, he would not study. Himself, he had worked for years on the synthesis of antibodies; he was at present in a blind alley, and at Mohalis there was no one who was interested, no one to stir him, but he was having an agreeable time massacring the opsonin theory, and that cheered him.
“No, I have done nothing except be unpleasant to people that claim too much, but I have dreams of real discoveries some day. And— No. Not five times in five years do I have students who understand craftsmanship and precision and maybe some big imagination in hypotheses. I t’ink perhaps you may have them. If I can help you— So!
“I do not t’ink you will be a good doctor. Good doctors are fine—often they are artists—but their trade, it is not for us lonely ones that work in labs. Once, I took an M.D. label. In Heidelberg that was— Herr Gott, back in 1875! I could not get much interested in bandaging legs and looking at tongues. I was a follower of Helmholtz—what a wild blithering young fellow! I tried to make researches into the physicsof sound— I was bad, most unbelievable, but I learned that in this wale of tears there is nothing certain but the quantitative method. And I was a chemist—a fine stink-maker was I. And so into biology and much trouble. It has been good. I have found one or two things. And if sometimes I feel an exile, cold— I had to get out of Germany one time for refusing to singDie Wacht am Rheinand trying to kill a cavalry captain—he was a stout fellow— I had to choke him—you see I am boasting, but I was a lifelyKerlthirty years ago! Ah! So!
“There is but one trouble of a philosophical bacteriologist. Why should we destroy these amiable pathogenic germs? Are we too sure, when we regard these oh, most unbeautiful young students attending Y. M. C. A.’s and singing dinkle-songs and wearing hats with initials burned into them—iss it worth while to protect them from the so elegantly functioningBacillus typhosuswith its lovely flagella? You know, once I asked Dean Silva would it not be better to let loose the pathogenic germs on the world, and so solve all economic questions. But he did not care for my met’od. Oh, well, he is older than I am; he also gives, I hear, some dinner parties with bishops and judges present, all in nice clothes. He would know more than a German Jew who loves Father Nietzsche and Father Schopenhauer (but damn him, he was teleological-minded!) and Father Koch and Father Pasteur and Brother Jacques Loeb and Brother Arrhenius. Ja! I talk foolishness. Let us go look at your slides and so good-night.”
When he had left Gottlieb at his stupid brown little house, his face as reticent as though the midnight supper and all the rambling talk had never happened, Martin ran home, altogether drunk.
Thoughbacteriology was all of Martin’s life now, it was the theory of the university that he was also studying pathology, hygiene, surgical anatomy, and enough other subjects to swamp a genius.
Clif Clawson and he lived in a large room with flowered wall-paper, piles of filthy clothes, iron beds, and cuspidors. They made their own breakfasts; they dined on hash at the Pilgrim Lunch Wagon or the Dew Drop Inn. Clif was occasionally irritating; he hated open windows; he talked of dirty socks; he sang “Some Die of Diabetes” when Martin was studying; and he was altogether unable to say anything directly. He had to be humorous. He remarked, “Is it your combobulatory concept that we might now feed the old faces?” or “How about ingurgitating a few calories?” But he had for Martin a charm that could not be accounted for by his cheerfulness, his shrewdness, his vague courage. The whole of Clif was more than the sum of his various parts.
In the joy of his laboratory work Martin thought rarely of his recent associates in Digamma Pi. He occasionally protested that the Reverend Ira Hinkley was a village policeman and Irving Watters a plumber, that Angus Duer would walk to success over his grandmother’s head, and that for an idiot like Fatty Pfaff to practise on helpless human beings was criminal, but mostly he ignored them and ceased to be a pest. And when he had passed his first triumphs in bacteriology and discovered how remarkably much he did not know, he was curiously humble.
If he was less annoying in regard to his classmates, he was more so in his classrooms. He had learned from Gottlieb the trick of using the word “control” in reference to the person or animal or chemical left untreated during an experiment, as a standard for comparison; and there is no trick more infuriating. When a physician boasted of his success with this drug or that electric cabinet, Gottlieb always snorted, “Wherewas your control? How many cases did you have under identical conditions, and how many of them did not get the treatment?” Now Martin began to mouth it—control, control, control, where’s your control? where’s your control?—till most of his fellows and a few of his instructors desired to lynch him.
He was particularly tedious in materia medica.
The professor of materia medica, Dr. Lloyd Davidson, would have been an illustrious shopkeeper. He was very popular. From him a future physician could learn that most important of all things: the proper drugs to give a patient, particularly when you cannot discover what is the matter with him. His classes listened with zeal, and memorized the sacred hundred and fifty favorite prescriptions. (He was proud that this was fifty more than his predecessor had required.)
But Martin was rebellious. He inquired, and publicly, “Dr. Davidson, how do they know ichthyol is good for erysipelas? Isn’t it just rotten fossil fish—isn’t it like the mummy-dust and puppy-ear stuff they used to give in the olden days?”
“How do they know? Why, my critical young friend, because thousands of physicians have used it for years and found their patients getting better, and that’s how they know!”
“But honest, Doctor, wouldn’t the patients maybe have gotten better anyway? Wasn’t it maybe apost hoc, propter hoc? Have they ever experimented on a whole slew of patients together, with controls?”
“Probably not—and until some genius like yourself, Arrowsmith, can herd together a few hundred people with exactly identical cases of erysipelas, it probably never will be tried! Meanwhile I trust that you other gentlemen, who perhaps lack Mr. Arrowsmith’s profound scientific attainments and the power to use such handy technical terms as ‘control,’ will, merely on my feeble advice, continue to use ichthyol!”
But Martin insisted, “Please, Dr. Davidson, what’s the use of getting all these prescriptions by heart, anyway? We’ll forget most of ’em, and besides, we can always look ’em up in the book.”
Davidson pressed his lips together, then:
“Arrowsmith, with a man of your age I hate to answer you as I would a three-year-old boy, but apparently I must. Therefore, you will learn the properties of drugs and the contents of prescriptionsbecause I tell you to! If I did not hesitate to waste the time of the other members of this class, I would tryto convince you that my statements may be accepted, not on my humble authority, but because they are the conclusions of wise men—men wiser or certainly a little older than you, my friend—through many ages. But as I have no desire to indulge in fancy flights of rhetoric and eloquence, I shall merely say that you will accept, and you will study, and you will memorize, because I tell you to!”
Martin considered dropping his medical course and specializing in bacteriology. He tried to confide in Clif, but Clif had become impatient of his fretting, and he turned again to the energetic and willowy Madeline Fox.
Madeline was at once sympathetic and sensible. Why not complete his medical course, then see what he wanted to do?
They tramped, they skated, they skied, they went to the University Dramatic Society play. Madeline’s widowed mother had come to live with her, and they had taken a top-floor flat in one of the tiny apartment-houses which were beginning to replace the expansive old wooden houses of Mohalis. The flat was full of literature and decoration: a bronze Buddha from Chicago, a rubbing of Shakespeare’s epitaph, a set of Anatole France in translation, a photograph of Cologne cathedral, a wicker tea-table with a samovar whose operation no one in the university understood, and a souvenir post-card album. Madeline’s mother was a Main Street dowager duchess. She was stately and white-haired but she attended the Methodist Church. In Mohalis she was flustered by the chatter of the students; she longed for her home-town, for the church sociables and the meetings of the women’s club—they were studying Education this year and she hated to lose all the information about university ways.
With a home and a chaperone, Madeline began to “entertain”: eight-o’clock parties with coffee, chocolate cake, chicken salad, and word-games. She invited Martin, but he was jealous of his evenings, beautiful evenings of research. The first affair to which she enticed him was her big New Year’s Party in January. They “did advertisements”—guessed at tableaux representing advertising pictures; they danced to the phonograph; and they had not merely a lap-supper but little tables excessively covered with doilies.
Martin was unaccustomed to such elegance. Though he had come in sulky unwillingness, he was impressed by the supper, by the frocks of the young women; he realized that his dancing was rusty, and he envied the senior who could do the new waltz called the “Boston.” There was no strength, no grace, no knowledge, that Martin Arrowsmith did not covet, when consciousness of it had pierced through the layers of his absorption. If he was but little greedy for possessions, he was hungry for every skill.
His reluctant wonder at the others was drowned in his admiration for Madeline. He had known her as a jacketed outdoor girl, but this was an exquisite indoor Madeline, slender in yellow silk. She seemed to him a miracle of tact and ease as she bullied her guests into an appearance of merriment. She had need of tact, for Dr. Norman Brumfit was there, and it was one of Dr. Brumfit’s evenings to be original and naughty. He pretended to kiss Madeline’s mother, which vastly discomforted the poor lady; he sang a strongly improper negro song containing the word hell; he maintained to a group of women graduate students that George Sand’s affairs might perhaps be partially justified by their influence on men of talent; and when they looked shocked, he pranced a little, and his eye-glasses glittered.
Madeline took charge of him. She trilled, “Dr. Brumfit, you’re terribly learned and so on and so forth, and sometimes in English classes I’m simply scared to death of you, but other times you’re nothing but a bad small boy, and I won’t have you teasing the girls. You can help me bring in the sherbet, that’s what you can do.”
Martin adored her. He hated Brumfit for the privilege of disappearing with her into the closet-like kitchen of the flat. Madeline! She was the one person who understood him! Here, where every one snatched at her and Dr. Brumfit beamed on her with almost matrimonial fondness, she was precious, she was something he must have.
On pretense of helping her set the tables, he had a moment with her, and whimpered, “Lord, you’re so lovely!”
“I’m glad you think I’m a wee bit nice.” She, the rose and the adored of all the world, gave him her favor.
“Can I come call on you to-morrow evening?”
“Well, I— Perhaps.”
It cannot be said, in this biography of a young man who was in no degree a hero, who regarded himself as a seeker after truth yet who stumbled and slid back all his life and bogged himself in every obvious morass, that Martin’s intentions toward Madeline Fox were what is called “honorable.” He was not a Don Juan, but he was a poor medical student who would have to wait for years before he could make a living. Certainly he did not think of proposing marriage. He wanted—like most poor and ardent young men in such a case, he wanted all he could get.
As he raced toward her flat, he was expectant of adventure. He pictured her melting; he felt her hand glide down his cheek. He warned himself, “Don’t be a fool now! Probably nothing doing at all. Don’t go get all worked up and then be disappointed. She’ll probably cuss you out for something you did wrong at the party. She’ll probably be sleepy and wish you hadn’t come. Nothing!” But he did not for a second believe it.
He rang, he saw her opening the door, he followed her down the meager hall, longing to take her hand. He came into the over-bright living-room—and he found her mother, solid as a pyramid, permanent-looking as sunless winter.
But of course Mother would obligingly go, and leave him to conquest.
Mother did not.
In Mohalis, the suitable time for young men callers to depart is ten o’clock, but from eight till a quarter after eleven Martin did battle with Mrs. Fox; talked to her in two languages, an audible gossip and a mute but furious protest, while Madeline—she was present; she sat about and looked pretty. In an equally silent tongue Mrs. Fox answered him, till the room was thick with their antagonism, while they seemed to be discussing the weather, the university, and the trolley service into Zenith.
“Yes, of course, some day I guess they’ll have a car every twenty minutes,” he said weightily.
(“Darn her, why doesn’t she go to bed? Cheers! She’s doing up her knitting. Nope. Damn it! She’s taking another ball of wool.”)
“Oh, yes, I’m sure they’ll have to have better service,” said Mrs. Fox.
(“Young man, I don’t know much about you, but I don’t believe you’re the right kind of person for Madeline to go with. Anyway, it’s time you went home.”)
“Oh, yes, sure, you bet. Lot better service.”
(“I know I’m staying too long, and I know you know it, but I don’t care!”)
It seemed impossible that Mrs. Fox should endure his stolid persistence. He used thought-forms, will-power, and hypnotism, and when he rose, defeated, she was still there, extremely placid. They said good-by not too warmly. Madeline took him to the door; for an exhilarating half-minute he had her alone.
“I wanted so much— I wanted to talk to you!”
“I know. I’m sorry. Some time!” she muttered.
He kissed her. It was a tempestuous kiss, and very sweet.
Fudge parties, skating parties, sleighing parties, a literary party with the guest of honor a lady journalist who did the social page for the ZenithAdvocate-Times— Madeline leaped into an orgy of jocund but extraordinarily tiring entertainments, and Martin obediently and smolderingly followed her. She appeared to have trouble in getting enough men, and to the literary evening Martin dragged the enraged Clif Clawson. Clif grumbled, “This is the damnedest zoo of sparrows I ever did time in,” but he bore off treasure—he had heard Madeline call Martin by her favorite name of “Martykins.” That was very valuable. Clif called him Martykins. Clif told others to call him Martykins. Fatty Pfaff and Irving Watters called him Martykins. And when Martin wanted to go to sleep, Clif croaked:
“Yuh, you’ll probably marry her. She’s a dead shot. She can hit a smart young M.D. at ninety paces. Oh, you’ll have one fine young time going on with science after that skirt sets you at tonsil-snatching.... She’s one of these literary birds. She knows all about lite’ature except maybe how to read.... She’s not so bad-looking, now. She’ll get fat, like her Ma.”
Martin said that which was necessary, and he concluded,“She’s the only girl in the graduate school that’s got any pep. The others just sit around and talk, and she gets up the best parties—”
“Any kissing parties?”
“Now you look here! I’ll be getting sore, first thing you know! You and I are roughnecks, but Madeline Fox—she’s like Angus Duer, some ways. I realize all the stuff we’re missing: music and literature, yes, and decent clothes, too—no harm to dressing well—”
“That’s just what I was tellin’ you! She’ll have you all dolled up in a Prince Albert and a boiled shirt, diagnosing everything as rich-widowitis. How you can fall for that four-flushing dame—Where’s your control?”
Clif’s opposition stirred him to consider Madeline not merely with a sly and avaricious interest but with a dramatic conviction that he longed to marry her.
Few women can for long periods keep from trying to Improve their men, and To Improve means to change a person from what he is, whatever that may be, into something else. Girls like Madeline Fox, artistic young women who do not work at it, cannot be restrained from Improving for more than a day at a time. The moment the urgent Martin showed that he was stirred by her graces, she went at his clothes—his corduroys and soft collars and eccentric old gray felt hat—at his vocabulary and his taste in fiction, with new and more patronizing vigor. Her sketchy way of saying, “Why, of course everybody knows that Emerson was the greatest thinker” irritated him the more in contrast to Gottlieb’s dark patience.
“Oh, let me alone!” he hurled at her. “You’re the nicest thing the Lord ever made, when you stick to things you know about, but when you spring your ideas on politics and chemotherapy— Darn it, quit bullying me! I guess you’re right about slang. I’ll cut out all this junk about ‘feeding your face’ and so on. But I will not put on a hard-boiled collar! I won’t!”
He might never have proposed to her but for the spring evening on the roof.
She used the flat roof of her apartment-house as a garden. She had set out one box of geraniums and a cast-iron benchlike those once beheld in cemetery plots; she had hung up two Japanese lanterns—they were ragged and they hung crooked. She spoke with scorn of the other inhabitants of the apartment-house, who were “so prosaic, so conventional, that they never came up to this darling hidey-place.” She compared her refuge to the roof of a Moorish palace, to a Spanish patio, to a Japanese garden, to a “pleasaunce of old Provençal.” But to Martin it seemed a good deal like a plain roof. He was vaguely ready for a quarrel, that April evening when he called on Madeline and her mother sniffily told him that she was to be found on the roof.
“Damned Japanese lanterns. Rather look at liver-sections,” he grumbled, as he trudged up the curving stairs.
Madeline was sitting on the funereal iron bench, her chin in her hands. For once she did not greet him with flowery excitement but with a noncommittal “Hello.” She seemed spiritless. He felt guilty for his scoffing; he suddenly saw the pathos in her pretense that this stretch of tar-paper and slatted walks was a blazing garden. As he sat beside her he piped, “Say, that’s a dandy new strip of matting you’ve put down.”
“It is not! It’s mangy!” She turned toward him. She wailed, “Oh, Mart, I’m so sick of myself, to-night. I’m always trying to make people think I’m somebody. I’m not. I’m a bluff.”
“What is it, dear?”
“Oh, it’s lots. Dr. Brumfit, hang him—only he was right—he as good as told me that if I don’t work harder I’ll have to get out of the graduate school. I’m not doing a thing, he said, and if I don’t have my Ph.D., then I won’t be able to land a nice job teaching English in some swell school, and I’d better land one, too, because it doesn’t look to poor Madeline as if anybody was going to marry her.”
His arm about her, he blared, “I know exactly who—”
“No, I’m not fishing. I’m almost honest, to-night. I’m no good, Mart. I tell people how clever I am. And I don’t suppose they believe it. Probably they go off and laugh at me!”
“They do not! If they did— I’d like to see anybody that tried laughing—”
“It’s awfully sweet and dear of you, but I’m not worth it. The poetic Madeline! With her ree-fined vocabulary! I’m a— I’m a— Martin, I’m a tin-horn sport! I’m everything your friend Clif thinks I am. Oh, you needn’t tell me. I knowwhat he thinks. And— I’ll have to go home with mother, and I can’t stand it, dear, I can’t stand it! I won’t go back! That town! Never anything doing! The old tabbies, and the beastly old men, always telling the same old jokes. I won’t!”
Her head was in the hollow of his arm; she was weeping, hard; he was stroking her hair, not covetously now but tenderly, and he was whispering:
“Darling! I almost feel as if I dared to love you. You’re going to marry me and— Take me couple more years to finish my medical course and couple in hospital, then we’ll be married and— By thunder, with you helping me, I’m going to climb to the top! Be big surgeon! We’re going to have everything!”
“Dearest, do be wise. I don’t want to keep you from your scientific work—”
“Oh. Well. Well, I would like to keep upsomeresearch. But thunder, I’m not just a lab-cat. Battle o’ life. Smashing your way through. Competing with real men in real he-struggle. If I can’t do that and do some scientific work too, I’m no good. Course while I’m with Gottlieb, I want to take advantage of it, but afterward— Oh, Madeline!”
Then was all reasoning lost in a blur of nearness to her.
He dreaded the interview with Mrs. Fox; he was certain that she would demand, “Young man, how do you expect to support my Maddy? And you use bad language.” But she took his hand and mourned, “I hope you and my baby will be happy. She’s a dear good girl, even if she is a little flighty sometimes, and I know you’re nice and kind and hard-working. I shall pray you’ll be happy—oh, I’ll pray so hard! You young people don’t seem to think much of prayer, but if you knew how it helped me— Oh, I’ll petition for your sweet happiness!”
She was weeping; she kissed Martin’s forehead with the dry, soft, gentle kiss of an old woman, and he was near to weeping with her.
At parting Madeline whispered, “Boy, I don’t care a bit, myself, but Mother would love it if we went to church with her. Don’t you think you could, just once?”
The astounded world, the astounded and profane Clif Clawson, had the spectacle of Martin in shiny pressed clothes, a painful linen collar, and an arduously tied scarf, accompanying Mrs. Fox and the chastely chattering Madeline to the Mohalis Methodist Church, to hear the Reverend Dr. Myron Schwab discourse on “The One Way to Righteousness.”
They passed the Reverend Ira Hinkley, and Ira gloated with a holy gloating at Martin’s captivity.
For all his devotion to Max Gottlieb’s pessimistic view of the human intellect, Martin had believed that there was such a thing as progress, that events meant something, that people could learn something, that if Madeline had once admitted she was an ordinary young woman who occasionally failed, then she was saved. He was bewildered when she began improving him more airily than ever. She complained of his vulgarity and what she asserted to be his slack ambition. “You think it’s terribly smart of you to feel superior. Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t just laziness. You like to day-dream around labs. Why shouldyoube spared the work of memorizing your materia medica and so on and so forth? All the others have to do it. No, I won’t kiss you. I want you to grow up and listen to reason.”
In fury at her badgering, in desire for her lips and forgiving smile, he was whirled through to the end of the term.
A week before examinations, when he was trying to spend twenty-four hours a day in making love to her, twenty-four in grinding for examinations, and twenty-four in the bacteriological laboratory, he promised Clif that he would spend that summer vacation with him, working as a waiter in a Canadian hotel. He met Madeline in the evening, and with her walked through the cherry orchard on the Agricultural Experiment Station grounds.
“You know what I think of your horrid Clif Clawson,” she complained. “I don’t suppose you care to hear my opinion of him.”
“I’ve had your opinion, my beloved.” Martin sounded mature, and not too pleasant.
“Well, I can tell you right now you haven’t had my opinion of your being a waiter! For the life of me I can’t understand why you don’t get some gentlemanly job for vacation, insteadof hustling dirty dishes. Why couldn’t you work on a newspaper, where you’d have to dress decently and meet nice people?”
“Sure. I might edit the paper. But since you say so, I won’t work at all this summer. Fool thing to do, anyway. I’ll go to Newport and play golf and wear a dress suit every night.”
“It wouldn’t hurt you any! I do respect honest labor. It’s like Burns says. But waiting on table! Oh, Mart, why are you so proud of being a roughneck? Do stop being smart, for a minute. Listen to the night. And smell the cherry blossoms.... Or maybe a great scientist like you, that’s so superior to ordinary people, is too good for cherry blossoms!”
“Well, except for the fact that every cherry blossom has been gone for weeks now, you’re dead right.”
“Oh, they have, have they! They may be faded but— Will you be so good as to tell me what that pale white mass is up there?”
“I will. It looks to me like a hired-man’s shirt.”
“Martin Arrowsmith, if you think for one moment that I’m ever going to marry a vulgar, crude, selfish, microbe-grubbing smart aleck—”
“And if you think I’m going to marry a dame that keeps nag-nag-naggin’ and jab-jab-jabbin’ at me all day long—”
They hurt each other; they had pleasure in it; and they parted forever, twice they parted forever, the second time very rudely, near a fraternity-house where students were singing heart-breaking summer songs to a banjo.
In ten days, without seeing her again, he was off with Clif to the North Woods, and in his sorrow of losing her, his longing for her soft flesh and for her willingness to listen to him, he was only a little excited that he should have led the class in bacteriology, and that Max Gottlieb should have appointed him undergraduate assistant for the coming year.