She’d a dark and a roving eye,And her hair hung down in ringlets,A nice girl, a decent girl,But one of the rakish kind.
She’d a dark and a roving eye,And her hair hung down in ringlets,A nice girl, a decent girl,But one of the rakish kind.
She’d a dark and a roving eye,And her hair hung down in ringlets,A nice girl, a decent girl,But one of the rakish kind.
At four, the Arrowsmiths had been accepted by the most desperately Smart Set of Nautilus, and at four-thirty they were driven home, at a speed neither legal nor kind, by Clay Tredgold.
There was in Nautilus a country club which was the axis of what they called Society, but there was also a tribe of perhaps twelve families in the Ashford Grove section who, though they went to the country club for golf, condescended to other golfers, kept to themselves, and considered themselves as belonging more to Chicago than to Nautilus. They took turns in entertaining one another. They assumed that they were all welcome at any party given by any of them, and to none of their parties was any one outside the Group invited except migrants from larger cities and occasional free lances like Martin. They were a tight little garrison in a heathen town.
The members of the Group were very rich, and one of them, Montgomery Mugford, knew something about his great-grandfather. They lived in Tudor manor houses and Italian villas so new that the scarred lawns had only begun to grow. They had large cars and larger cellars, though the cellars contained nothing but gin, whisky, vermouth, and a few sacred bottles of rather sweet champagne. Every one in the Group was familiar with New York—they stayed at the St. Regis or the Plaza and went about buying clothes and discovering small smart restaurants—and five of the twelve couples had been in Europe; had spent a week in Paris, intending to go to art galleries and actually going to the more expensive fool-traps of Montmartre.
In the Group Martin and Leora found themselves welcomed as poor relations. They were invited to choric dinners, to Sunday lunches at the country club. Whatever the event, it always ended in rapidly motoring somewhere, having a number of drinks, and insisting that Martin again “give that imitation of Doc Pickerbaugh.”
Besides motoring, drinking, and dancing to the Victrola, the chief diversion of the Group was cards. Curiously, in this completely unmoral set, there were no flirtations; they talked with considerable freedom about “sex,” but they all seemed monogamic, all happily married or afraid to appear unhappily married. But when Martin knew them better he heard murmurs of husbands having “times” in Chicago, of wives picking up young men in New York hotels, and he scented furious restlessness beneath their superior sexual calm.
It is not known whether Martin ever completely accepted as a gentleman-scholar the Clay Tredgold who was devoted to everything about astronomy except studying it, or Monte Mugford as the highly descended aristocrat, but he did admire the Group’s motor cars, shower baths, Fifth Avenue frocks, tweed plus-fours, and houses somewhat impersonally decorated by daffodillic young men from Chicago. He discovered sauces and old silver. He began to consider Leora’s clothes not merely as convenient coverings, but as a possible expression of charm, and irritably he realized how careless she was.
In Nautilus, alone, rarely saying much about herself, Leora had developed an intense mute little life of her own. She belonged to a bridge club, and she went solemnly by herself to the movies, but her ambition was to know France and it engrossed her. It was an old desire, mysterious in source and long held secret, but suddenly she was sighing:
“Sandy, the one thing I want to do, maybe ten years from now, is to see Touraine and Normandy and Carcassonne. Could we, do you think?”
Rarely had Leora asked for anything. He was touched and puzzled as he watched her reading books on Brittany, as he caught her, over a highly simplified French grammar, breathing “J’ay—j’aye—damn it, whatever it is!”
He crowed, “Lee, dear, if you want to go to France— Listen! Some day we’ll shoot over there with a couple of knapsacks on our backs, and we’ll see that ole country from end to end!”
Gratefully yet doubtfully: “You know, if you got bored, Sandy, you could go see the work at the Pasteur Institute. Oh, I would like to tramp, just once, between high plastered walls, and come to a foolish little café and watch the men with funny red sashes and floppy blue pants go by. Really, do you think maybe we could?”
Leora was strangely popular in the Ashford Grove Group, though she possessed nothing of what Martin called their “elegance.” She always had at least one button missing. Mrs. Tredgold, best natured as she was least pious of women, adopted her complete.
Nautilus had always doubted Clara Tredgold. Mrs. Almus Pickerbaugh said that she “took no part in any movement for the betterment of the city.” For years she had seemed content to grow her roses, to make her startling hats, to almond-cream her lovely hands, and listen to her husband’s improper stories—and for years she had been a lonely woman. In Leora she perceived an interested casualness equal to her own. The two women spent afternoons sitting on the sun-porch, reading, doing their nails, smoking cigarettes, saying nothing, trusting each other.
With the other women of the Group Leora was never so intimate as with Clara Tredgold, but they liked her, the more because she was a heretic whose vices, her smoking, her indolence, her relish of competent profanity, disturbed Mrs. Pickerbaugh and Mrs. Irving Watters. The Group rather approved all unconventionalities—except such economic unconventionalities as threatened their easy wealth. Leora had tea, or a cocktail, alone with nervous young Mrs. Monte Mugford, who had been the lightest-footed débutante in Des Moines four years before and who hated now the coming of her secondbaby; and it was to Leora that Mrs. Schlemihl, though publicly she was rompish and serene with her porker of a husband, burst out, “If that man would only quit pawing me—reaching for me—slobbering on me! I hate it here! Iwillhave my winter in New York—alone!”
The childish Martin Arrowsmith, so unworthy of Leora’s old quiet wisdoms, was not content with her acceptance by the Group. When she appeared with a hook unfastened or her hair like a crow’s nest, he worried, and said things about her “sloppiness” which he later regretted.
“Why can’t you take a little time to make yourself attractive? God knows you haven’t anything else to do! Great Jehoshaphat, can’t you even sew on buttons?”
But Clara Tredgold laughed, “Leora, I do think you have the sweetest back, but do you mind if I pin you up before the others come?”
It happened after a party which lasted till two, when Mrs. Schlemihl had worn the new frock from Lucile’s and Jack Brundidge (by day vice-president and sales-manager of the Maize Mealies Company) had danced what he belligerently asserted to be a Finnish polka, that when Martin and Leora were driving home in a borrowed Health Department car he snarled, “Lee, why can’t you ever take any trouble with what you wear? Here this morning—or yesterday morning—you were going to mend that blue dress, and as far as I can figure out you haven’t done a darn’ thing the whole day but sit around and read, and then you come out with that ratty embroidery—”
“Will you stop the car!” she cried.
He stopped it, astonished. The headlights made ridiculously important a barbed-wire fence, a litter of milkweeds, a bleak reach of gravel road.
She demanded, “Do you want me to become a harem beauty? I could. I could be a floosey. But I’ve never taken the trouble. Oh, Sandy, I won’t go on fighting with you. Either I’m the foolish sloppy wife that I am, or I’m nothing. What do you want? Do you want a real princess like Clara Tredgold, or do you want me, that don’t care a hang where we go or what we do as long as we stand by each other? You do such a lot of worrying. I’m tired of it. Come on now. What do you want?”
“I don’t want anything but you. But can’t you understand— I’m not just a climber— I want us both to be equal to anything we run into. I certainly don’t see why we should be inferior to this bunch, inanything. Darling, except for Clara, maybe, they’re nothing but rich bookkeepers! But we’re real soldiers of fortune. Your France that you love so much—some day we’ll go there, and the French President will be at the N. P. depot to meet us! Why should we let anybody do anything better than we can? Technique!”
They talked for an hour in that drab place, between the poisonous lines of barbed wire.
Next day, when Orchid came into his laboratory and begged, with the wistfulness of youth, “Oh, Dr. Martin, aren’t you ever coming to the house again?” he kissed her so briskly, so cheerfully, that even a flapper could perceive that she was unimportant.
Martin realized that he was likely to be the next Director of the Department. Pickerbaugh had told him, “Your work is very satisfactory. There’s only one thing you lack, my boy: enthusiasm for getting together with folks and giving a long pull and a strong pull, all together. But perhaps that’ll come to you when you have more responsibility.”
Martin sought to acquire a delight in giving long strong pulls all together, but he felt like a man who has been dragooned into wearing yellow tights at a civic pageant.
“Gosh, I may be up against it when I become Director,” he fretted. “I wonder if there’s people who become what’s called ‘successful’ and then hate it? Well, anyway, I’ll start a decent system of vital statistics in the department before they get me. I won’t lay down! I’ll fight! I’ll make myself succeed!”
Itmay have been a yearning to give one concentrated dose of inspiration so powerful that no citizen of Nautilus would ever again dare to be ill, or perhaps Dr. Pickerbaugh desired a little reasonable publicity for his congressional campaign, but certainly the Health Fair which the good man organized was overpowering.
He got an extra appropriation from the Board of Aldermen; he bullied all the churches and associations into coöperation; he made the newspapers promise to publish three columns of praise each day.
He rented the rather dilapidated wooden “tabernacle” in which the Reverend Mr. Billy Sunday, an evangelist, had recently wiped out all the sin in the community. He arranged for a number of novel features. The Boy Scouts were to give daily drills. There was a W. C. T. U. booth at which celebrated clergymen and other physiologists would demonstrate the evils of alcohol. In a bacteriology booth, the protesting Martin (in a dinky white coat) was to do jolly things with test-tubes. An anti-nicotine lady from Chicago offered to kill a mouse every half-hour by injecting ground-up cigarette paper into it. The Pickerbaugh twins, Arbuta and Gladiola, now aged six, were to show the public how to brush its teeth, and in fact they did, until a sixty-year-old farmer of whom they had lovingly inquired, “Do you brush your teeth daily?” made thunderous answer, “No, but I’m going to paddle your bottoms daily, and I’m going to start in right now.”
None of these novelties was so stirring as the Eugenic Family, who had volunteered to give, for a mere forty dollars a day, an example of the benefits of healthful practises.
They were father, mother, and five children, all so beautiful and powerful that they had recently been presenting refined acrobatic exhibitions on the Chautauqua Circuit. None of them smoked, drank, spit upon pavements, used foul language, or ate meat. Pickerbaugh assigned to them the chief booth,on the platform once sacerdotally occupied by the Reverend Mr. Sunday.
There were routine exhibits: booths with charts and banners and leaflets. The Pickerbaugh Healthette Octette held song recitals, and daily there were lectures, most of them by Pickerbaugh or by his friend Dr. Bissex, football coach and professor of hygiene and most other subjects in Mugford College.
A dozen celebrities, including Gustaf Sondelius and the governor of the state, were invited to come and “give their messages,” but it happened, unfortunately, that none of them seemed able to get away that particular week.
The Health Fair opened with crowds and success. There was a slight misunderstanding the first day. The Master Bakers’ Association spoke strongly to Pickerbaugh about the sign “Too much pie makes pyorrhea” on the diet booth. But the thoughtless and prosperity-destroying sign was removed at once, and the Fair was thereafter advertised in every bakery in town.
The only unhappy participant, apparently, was Martin. Pickerbaugh had fitted up for him an exhibition laboratory which, except that it had no running water and except that the fire laws forbade his using any kind of a flame, was exactly like a real one. All day long he poured a solution of red ink from one test-tube into another, with his microscope carefully examined nothing at all, and answered the questions of persons who wished to know how you put bacterias to death once you had caught them swimming about.
Leora appeared as his assistant, very pretty and demure in a nurse’s costume, very exasperating as she chuckled at his low cursing. They found one friend, the fireman on duty, a splendid person with stories about pet cats in the fire-house and no tendency to ask questions in bacteriology. It was he who showed them how they could smoke in safety. Behind the Clean Up and Prevent Fires exhibit, consisting of a miniature Dirty House with red arrows to show where a fire might start and an extremely varnished Clean House, there was an alcove with a broken window which would carry off the smoke of their cigarettes. To this sanctuary Martin, Leora, and the bored fireman retired a dozen times a day, and thus wore through the week.
One other misfortune occurred. The detective sergeant,coming in not to detect but to see the charming spectacle of the mouse dying in agony from cigarette paper, stopped before the booth of the Eugenic Family, scratched his head, hastened to the police station, and returned with certain pictures. He growled to Pickerbaugh:
“Hm. That Eugenic Family. Don’t smoke or booze or anything?”
“Absolutely! And look at their perfect health.”
“Hm. Better keep an eye on ’em. I won’t spoil your show, Doc—we fellows at City Hall had all ought to stick together. I won’t run ’em out of town till after the Fair. But they’re the Holton gang. The man and woman ain’t married, and only one of the kids is theirs. They’ve done time for selling licker to the Indians, but their specialty, before they went into education, used to be the badger game. I’ll detail a plain-clothes man to keep ’em straight. Fine show you got here, Doc. Ought to give this city a lasting lesson in the value of up-to-date health methods. Good luck! Say, have you picked your secretary yet, for when you get to Congress? I’ve got a nephew that’s a crackajack stenographer and a bright kid and knows how to keep his mouth shut about stuff that don’t concern him. I’ll send him around to have a talk with you. So long.”
But, except that once he caught the father of the Eugenic Family relieving the strain of being publicly healthy by taking a long, gurgling, ecstatic drink from a flask, Pickerbaugh found nothing wrong in their conduct, till Saturday. There was nothing wrong with anything, till then.
Never had a Fair been such a moral lesson, or secured so much publicity. Every newspaper in the congressional district gave columns to it, and all the accounts, even in the Democratic papers, mentioned Pickerbaugh’s campaign.
Then, on Saturday, the last day of the Fair, came tragedy.
There was terrific rain, the roof leaked without restraint, and the lady in charge of the Healthy Housing Booth, which also leaked, was taken home threatened with pneumonia. At noon, when the Eugenic Family were giving a demonstration of perfect vigor, their youngest blossom had an epileptic fit, and before the excitement was over, upon the Chicago anti-nicotine lady as she triumphantly assassinated a mouse charged an anti-vivisection lady, also from Chicago.
Round the two ladies and the unfortunate mouse gathered acrowd. The anti-vivisection lady called the anti-nicotine lady a murderer, a wretch, and an atheist, all of which the anti-nicotine lady endured, merely weeping a little and calling for the police. But when the anti-vivisection lady wound up, “And as for your pretensions to know anything about science, you’re no scientist at all!” then with a shriek the anti-nicotine lady leaped from her platform, dug her fingers into the anti-vivisection lady’s hair, and observed with distinctness, “I’ll show you whether I know anything about science!”
Pickerbaugh tried to separate them. Martin, standing happily with Leora and their friend the fireman on the edge, distinctly did not. Both ladies turned on Pickerbaugh and denounced him, and when they had been removed he was the center of a thousand chuckles, in decided danger of never going to Congress.
At two o’clock, when the rain had slackened, when the after-lunch crowd had come in and the story of the anti ladies was running strong, the fireman retired behind the Clean Up and Prevent Fires exhibit for his hourly smoke. He was a very sleepy and unhappy little fireman; he was thinking about the pleasant fire-house and the unending games of pinochle. He dropped the match, unextinguished, on the back porch of the model Clean House. The Clean House had been so handsomely oiled that it was like kindling soaked in kerosene. It flared up, and instantly the huge and gloomy Tabernacle was hysterical with flames. The crowd rushed toward the exits.
Naturally, most of the original exits of the Tabernacle had been blocked by booths. There was a shrieking panic, and children were being trampled.
Almus Pickerbaugh was neither a coward nor slothful. Suddenly, coming from nowhere, he was marching through the Tabernacle at the head of his eight daughters, singing “Dixie,” his head up, his eyes terrible, his arms wide in pleading. The crowd weakly halted. With the voice of a clipper captain he unsnarled them and ushered them safely out, then charged back into the spouting flames.
The rain-soaked building had not caught. The fireman, with Martin and the head of the Eugenic Family, was beating the flames. Nothing was destroyed save the Clean House, and the crowd which had fled in agony came back in wonder. Their hero was Pickerbaugh.
Within two hours the Nautilus papers vomited specials whichexplained that not merely had Pickerbaugh organized the greatest lesson in health ever seen, but he had also, by his courage and his power to command, saved hundreds of people from being crushed, which latter was probably the only completely accurate thing that has been said about Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh in ten thousand columns of newspaper publicity.
Whether to see the Fair, Pickerbaugh, the delightful ravages of a disaster, or another fight between the anti ladies, half the city struggled into the Tabernacle that evening, and when Pickerbaugh took the platform for his closing lecture he was greeted with frenzy. Next day, when he galloped into the last week of his campaign, he was overlord of all the district.
His opponent was a snuffy little lawyer whose strength lay in his training. He had been state senator, lieutenant governor, county judge. But the Democratic slogan, “Pickerbaugh the Pick-up Candidate,” was drowned in the admiration for the hero of the health fair. He dashed about in motors, proclaiming, “I am not running because I want office, but because I want the chance to take to the whole nation my ideals of health.” Everywhere was plastered:
For CongressPICKERBAUGHThe two-fisted fighting poet docJust elect him for a termAnd all through the nation he’ll swat the germ.
Enormous meetings were held. Pickerbaugh was ample and vague about his Policies. Yes, he was opposed to our entering the European War, but he assured them, he certainly did assure them, that he was for using every power of our Government to end this terrible calamity. Yes, he was for high tariff, but it must be so adjusted that the farmers in his district could buy everything cheaply. Yes, he was for high wages for each and every workman, but he stood like a rock, like a boulder, like a moraine, for protecting the prosperity of all manufacturers, merchants, and real-estate owners.
While this larger campaign thundered, there was proceeding in Nautilus a smaller and much defter campaign, to reëlect asmayor one Mr. Pugh, Pickerbaugh’s loving chief. Mr. Pugh sat nicely at desks, and he was pleasant and promissory to everybody who came to see him; clergymen, gamblers, G. A. R. veterans, circus advance-agents, policemen, and ladies of reasonable virtue—everybody except perhaps socialist agitators, against whom he staunchly protected the embattled city. In his speeches Pickerbaugh commended Pugh for “that firm integrity and ready sympathy with which His Honor had backed up every movement for the public weal,” and when Pickerbaugh (quite honestly) begged, “Mr. Mayor, if I go to Congress you must appoint Arrowsmith in my place; he knows nothing about politics but he’s incorruptible,” then Pugh gave his promise, and amity abode in that land.... Nobody said anything at all about Mr. F. X. Jordan.
F. X. Jordan was a contractor with a generous interest in politics. Pickerbaugh called him a grafter, and the last time Pugh had been elected—it had been on a Reform Platform, though since that time the reform had been coaxed to behave itself and be practical—both Pugh and Pickerbaugh had denounced Jordan as a “malign force.” But so kindly was Mayor Pugh that in the present election he said nothing that could hurt Mr. Jordan’s feelings, and in return what could Mr. Jordan do but speak forgivingly about Mr. Pugh to the people in blind-pigs and houses of ill fame?
On the evening of the election, Martin and Leora were among the company awaiting the returns at the Pickerbaughs’. They were confident. Martin had never been roused by politics, but he was stirred now by Pickerbaugh’s twitchy pretense of indifference, by the telephoned report from the newspaper office, “Here’s Willow Grove township— Pickerbaugh leading, two to one!” by the crowds which went past the house howling, “Pickerbaugh, Pickerbaugh, Pickerbaugh!”
At eleven the victory was certain, and Martin, his bowels weak with unconfidence, realized that he was now Director of Public Health, with responsibility for seventy thousand lives.
He looked wistfully toward Leora and in her still smile found assurance.
Orchid had been airy and distant with Martin all evening, and dismayingly chatty and affectionate with Leora. Now she drew him into the back parlor and “So I’m going off to Washington—and you don’t care a bit!” she said, her eyes blurredand languorous and undefended. He held her, muttering, “You darling child, I can’t let you go!” As he walked home he thought less of being Director than of Orchid’s eyes.
In the morning he groaned, “Doesn’t anybody ever learn anything? Must I watch myself and still be a fool, all my life? Doesn’t any story ever end?”
He never saw her afterward, except on the platform of the train.
Leora surprisingly reflected, after the Pickerbaughs had gone, “Sandy dear, I know how you feel about losing your Orchid. It’s sort of Youth going. She really is a peach. Honestly, I can appreciate how you feel, and sympathize with you— I mean, of course, providin’ you aren’t ever going to see her again.”
Over theNautilus Cornfield’sannouncement was the vigorous headline:
ALMUS PICKERBAUGH WINSFirst Scientist Ever Electedto CongressSide-kick of Darwin and PasteurGives New Punch to SteeringShip of State
Pickerbaugh’s resignation was to take effect at once; he was, he explained, going to Washington before his term began, to study legislative methods and start his propaganda for the creation of a national Secretaryship of Health. There was a considerable struggle over the appointment of Martin in his stead. Klopchuk the dairyman was bitter; Irving Watters whispered to fellow doctors that Martin was likely to extend the socialistic free clinics; F. X. Jordan had a sensible young doctor as his own candidate. It was the Ashford Grove Group, Tredgold, Schlemihl, Monte Mugford, who brought it off.
Martin went to Tredgold worrying, “Do the people want me? Shall I fight Jordan or get out?”
Tredgold said balmily, “Fight? What about? I own a good share of the bank that’s lent various handy little sums to Mayor Pugh. You leave it to me.”
Next day Martin was appointed, but only as Acting Director, with a salary of thirty-five hundred instead of four thousand.
That he had been put in by what he would have called “crooked politics” did not occur to him.
Mayor Pugh called him in and chuckled:
“Doc, there’s been a certain amount of opposition to you, because you’re pretty young and not many folks know you. I haven’t any doubt I can give you the full appointment later—if we find you’re competent and popular. Meantime you better avoid doing anything brash. Just come and ask my advice. I know this town and the people that count better than you do.”
The day of Pickerbaugh’s leaving for Washington was made a fiesta. At the Armory, from twelve to two, the Chamber of Commerce gave to everybody who came a lunch of hot wienies, doughnuts, and coffee, with chewing gum for the women and, for the men, Schweinhügel’s Little Dandy Nautilus-made Cheroots.
The train left at three-fifty-five. The station was, to the astonishment of innocent passengers gaping from the train windows, jammed with thousands.
By the rear platform, on a perilous packing box, Mayor Pugh held forth. The Nautilus Silver Cornet Band played three patriotic selections, then Pickerbaugh stood on the platform, his family about him. As he looked on the crowd, tears were in his eyes.
“For once,” he stammered, “I guess I can’t make a speech. D-darn it, I’m all choked up! I meant to orate a lot, but all I can say is— I love you all, I’m mighty grateful, I’ll represent you my level best, neighbors! God bless you!”
The train moved out, Pickerbaugh waving as long as he could see them.
And Martin to Leora, “Oh, he’s a fine old boy. He— No, I’m hanged if he is! The world’s always letting people get away with asininities because they’re kind-hearted. And here I’ve sat back like a coward, not saying a word, and watched ’em loose that wind-storm on the whole country. Oh, curse it, isn’t anything in the world simple? Well, let’s go to the office, and I’ll begin to do things conscientiously and all wrong.”
Itcannot be said that Martin showed any large ability for organization, but under him the Department of Public Health changed completely. He chose as his assistant Dr. Rufus Ockford, a lively youngster recommended by Dean Silva of Winnemac. The routine work, examination of babies, quarantines, anti-tuberculosis placarding, went on as before.
Inspection of plumbing and food was perhaps more thorough, because Martin lacked Pickerbaugh’s buoyant faith in the lay inspectors, and one of them he replaced, to the considerable displeasure of the colony of Germans in the Homedale district. Also he gave thought to the killing of rats and fleas, and he regarded the vital statistics as something more than a recording of births and deaths. He had notions about their value which were most amusing to the health department clerk. He wanted a record of the effect of race, occupation, and a dozen other factors upon the disease rate.
The chief difference was that Martin and Rufus Ockford found themselves with plenty of leisure. Martin estimated that Pickerbaugh must have used half his time in being inspirational and eloquent.
He made his first mistake in assigning Ockford to spend part of the week in the free city clinic, in addition to the two half-time physicians. There was fury in the Evangeline County Medical Society. At a restaurant, Irving Watters came over to Martin’s table.
“I hear you’ve increased the clinic staff,” said Dr. Watters.
“Yuh.”
“Thinking of increasing it still more?”
“Might be a good idea.”
“Now you see here, Mart. As you know, Mrs. Watters and I have done everything in our power to make you and Leora welcome. Glad to do anything I can for a fellow alumnus of old Winnemac. But at the same time, there are limits, you know! Not that I’ve got any objection to your providingfree clinical facilities. Don’t know but what it’s a good thing to treat the damn’, lazy, lousy pauper-class free, and keep the D.B.’s off the books of the regular physicians. But sametime, when you begin to make a practise of encouraging a lot of folks, that can afford to pay, to go and get free treatment, and practically you attack the integrity of the physicians of this city, that have been giving God knows how much of their time to charity—”
Martin answered neither wisely nor competently: “Irve, sweetheart, you can go straight to hell!”
After that hour, when they met there was nothing said between them.
Without disturbing his routine work, he found himself able to sink blissfully into the laboratory. At first he merely tinkered, but suddenly he was in full cry, oblivious of everything save his experiment.
He was playing with cultures isolated from various dairies and various people, thinking mostly of Klopchuk and streptococcus. Accidentally he discovered the lavish production of hemolysin in sheep’s blood as compared with the blood of other animals. Why should streptococcus dissolve the red blood corpuscles of sheep more easily than those of rabbits?
It is true that a busy health-department bacteriologist has no right to waste the public time in being curious, but the irresponsible sniffing beagle in Martin drove out the faithful routineer.
He neglected the examination of an ominously increasing number of tubercular sputums; he set out to answer the question of the hemolysin. He wanted the streptococcus to produce its blood-destroying poison in twenty-four-hour cultures.
He beautifully and excitedly failed, and sat for hours meditating. He tried a six-hour culture. He mixed the supernatant fluid from a centrifugated culture with a suspension of red blood corpuscles and placed it in the incubator. When he returned, two hours after, the blood cells were dissolved.
He telephoned to Leora: “Lee! Got something! C’n you pack up sandwich and come down here f’r evening?”
“Sure,” said Leora.
When she appeared he explained to her that his discovery was accidental, that most scientific discoveries were accidental, and that no investigator, however great, could do anything more than see the value of his chance results.
He sounded mature and rather angry.
Leora sat in the corner, scratching her chin, reading a medical journal. From time to time she reheated coffee, over a doubtful Bunsen flame. When the office staff arrived in the morning they found something that had but rarely occurred during the regime of Almus Pickerbaugh: the Director of the Department was transplanting cultures, and on a long table was his wife, asleep.
Martin blared at Dr. Ockford, “Get t’ hell out of this, Rufus, and take charge of the department for to-day— I’m out— I’m dead—and oh, say, get Leora home and fry her a couple o’ eggs, and you might bring me a Denver sandwich from the Sunset Trail Lunch, will you?”
“You bet, chief,” said Ockford.
Martin repeated his experiment, testing the cultures for hemolysin after two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve, fourteen, sixteen, and eighteen hours of incubation. He discovered that the maximum production of hemolysin occurred between four and ten hours. He began to work out the formula of production—and he was desolate. He fumed, raged, sweated. He found that his mathematics was childish, and all his science rusty. He pottered with chemistry, he ached over his mathematics, and slowly he began to assemble his results. He believed that he might have a paper for theJournal of Infectious Diseases.
Now Almus Pickerbaugh had published scientific papers—often. He had published them in theMidwest Medical Quarterly, of which he was one of fourteen editors. He had discovered the germ of epilepsy and the germ of cancer—two entirely different germs of cancer. Usually it took him a fortnight to make the discovery, write the report, and have it accepted. Martin lacked this admirable facility.
He experimented, he re-experimented, he cursed, he kept Leora out of bed, he taught her to make media, and was ill-pleased by her opinions on agar. He was violent to the stenographer; not once could the pastor of the Jonathan Edwards Congregational Church get him to address the Bible Class; and still for months his paper was not complete.
The first to protest was His Honor the Mayor. Returning from an extremely agreeable game of chemin de fer with F. X. Jordan, taking a short cut through the alley behind the City Hall, Mayor Pugh saw Martin at two in the morning drearily putting test-tubes into the incubator, while Leora sat in a corner smoking. Next day he summoned Martin, and protested:
“Doc, I don’t want to butt in on your department—my specialty is never butting in—but it certainly strikes me that after being trained by a seventy-horse-power booster like Pickerbaugh, you ought to know that it’s all damn’ foolishness to spend so much time in the laboratory, when you can hire an Ailaboratory fellow for thirty bucks a week. What you ought to be doing is jollying along these sobs that are always panning the administration. Get out and talk to the churches and clubs, and help me put across the ideas that we stand for.”
“Maybe he’s right,” Martin considered. “I’m a rotten bacteriologist. Probably I never will get this experiment together. My job here is to keep tobacco-chewers from spitting. Have I the right to waste the tax-payers’ money on anything else?”
But that week he read, as an announcement issued by the McGurk Institute of Biology of New York, that Dr. Max Gottlieb had synthesized antibodiesin vitro.
He pictured the saturnine Gottlieb not at all enjoying the triumph but, with locked door, abusing the papers for their exaggerative reports of his work; and as the picture became sharp Martin was like a subaltern stationed in a desert isle when he learns that his old regiment is going off to an agreeable Border war.
Then the McCandless fury broke.
Mrs. McCandless had once been a “hired girl”; then nurse, then confidante, then wife to the invalid Mr. McCandless, wholesale grocer and owner of real estate. When he died she inherited everything. There was a suit, of course, but she had an excellent lawyer.
She was a grim, graceless, shady, mean woman, yet a nymphomaniac. She was not invited into Nautilus society, but in her unaired parlor, on the mildewed couch, she entertained seedy, belching, oldish married men, a young policeman to whom she often lent money, and the contractor-politician, F. X. Jordan.
She owned, in Swede Hollow, the filthiest block of tenements in Nautilus. Martin had made a tuberculosis map of these tenements, and in conferences with Dr. Ockford and Leora hedenounced them as murder-holes. He wanted to destroy them, but the police power of the Director of Public Health was vague. Pickerbaugh had enjoyed the possession of large power only because he never used it.
Martin sought a court decision for the demolition of the McCandless tenements. Her lawyer was also the lawyer of F. X. Jordan, and the most eloquent witness against Martin was Dr. Irving Watters. But it chanced, because of the absence of the proper judge, that the case came before an ignorant and honest person who quashed the injunction secured by Mrs. McCandless’s lawyer and instructed the Department of Public Health that it might use such methods as the city ordinances provided for emergencies.
That evening Martin grumbled to young Ockford, “You don’t suppose for a moment, do you, Rufus, that McCandless and Jordan won’t appeal the case? Let’s get rid of the tenements while it’s comparatively legal, heh?”
“You bet, chief,” said Ockford, and, “Say, let’s go out to Oregon and start practise when we get kicked out. Well, we can depend on our sanitary inspector, anyway. Jordan seduced his sister, here ’bout six years back.”
At dawn a gang headed by Martin and Ockford, in blue overalls, joyful and rowdyish, invaded the McCandless tenements, drove the tenants into the street, and began to tear down the flimsy buildings. At noon, when lawyers appeared and the tenants were in new flats commandeered by Martin, the wreckers set fire to the lower stories, and in half an hour the buildings had been annihilated.
F. X. Jordan came to the scene after lunch. A filthy Martin and a dusty Ockford were drinking coffee brought by Leora.
“Well, boys,” said Jordan, “you’ve put it all over us. Only if you ever pull this kind of stunt again, use dynamite and save a lot of time. You know, I like you boys— I’m sorry for what I’ve got to do to you. But may the saints help you, because it’s just a question of time when I learn you not to monkey with the buzz-saw.”
Clay Tredgold admired their amateur arson and rejoiced, “Fine! I’m going to back you up in everything the D. P. H. does.”
Martin was not too pleased by the promise, for Tredgold’s set were somewhat exigent. They had decided that Martin and Leora were free spirits like themselves, and amusing, but they had also decided, long before the Arrowsmiths had by coming to Nautilus entered into authentic existence, that the Group had a monopoly of all Freedom and Amusingness, and they expected the Arrowsmiths to appear for cocktails and poker every Saturday and Sunday evening. They could not understand why Martin should desire to spend his time in a laboratory, drudging over something called “streptolysin,” which had nothing to do with cocktails, motors, steel windmills, or insurance.
On an evening perhaps a fortnight after the destruction of the McCandless tenements, Martin was working late in the laboratory. He wasn’t even doing experiments which might have diverted the Group—causing bacterial colonies to cloud liquids, or making things change color. He was merely sitting at a table, looking at logarithmic tables. Leora was not there, and he was mumbling, “Confound her, why did she have to go and be sick to-day?”
Tredgold and Schlemihl and their wives were bound for the Old Farmhouse Inn. They had telephoned to Martin’s flat and learned where he was. From the alley behind City Hall they could peer in and see him, dreary and deserted.
“We’ll take the old boy out and brighten him up. First, let’s rush home and shake up a few cocktails and bring ’em down to surprise him,” was Tredgold’s inspiration.
Tredgold came into the laboratory, a half-hour later, with much clamor.
“This is a nice way to put in a moonlit spring evening, young Narrowsmith! Come on, we’ll all go out and dance a little. Grab your hat.”
“Gosh, Clay, I’d like to, but honestly I can’t. I’ve got to work; simply got to.”
“Rats! Don’t be silly. You’ve been working too hard. Here—look what Father’s brought. Be reasonable. Get outside of a nice long cocktail and you’ll have a new light on things.”
Martin was reasonable up to that point, but he did not have a new light. Tredgold would not take No. Martin continued to refuse, affectionately, then a bit tartly. Outside, Schlemihl pressed down the button of the motor horn and held it, producing a demanding, infuriating yawp which made Martin cry, “For God’s sake go out and make ’em quit that, will you, and let me alone! I’ve got to work, I told you!”
Tredgold stared a moment. “I certainly shall! I’m not accustomed to force my attentions on people. Pardon me for disturbing you!”
By the time Martin sulkily felt that he must apologize, the car was gone. Next day and all the week, he waited for Tredgold to telephone, and Tredgold waited for him to telephone, and they fell into a circle of dislike. Leora and Clara Tredgold saw each other once or twice, but they were uncomfortable, and a fortnight later, when the most prominent physician in town dined with the Tredgolds and attacked Martin as a bumptious and narrow-visioned young man, both the Tredgolds listened and agreed.
Opposition to Martin developed all at once.
Various physicians were against him, not only because of the enlarged clinics, but because he rarely asked their help and never their advice. Mayor Pugh considered him tactless. Klopchuk and F. X. Jordan were assailing him as crooked. The reporters disliked him for his secrecy and occasional bruskness. And the Group had ceased to defend him. Of all these forces Martin was more or less aware, and behind them he fancied that doubtful business men, sellers of impure ice-cream and milk, owners of unsanitary shops and dirty tenements, men who had always hated Pickerbaugh but who had feared to attack him because of his popularity, were gathering to destroy the entire Department of Public Health.... He appreciated Pickerbaugh in those days, and loved soldier-wise the Department.
There came from Mayor Pugh a hint that he would save trouble by resigning. He would not resign. Neither would he go to the citizens begging for support. He did his work, and leaned on Leora’s assurance, and tried to ignore his detractors. He could not.
News-items and three-line editorial squibs dug at his tyranny, his ignorance, his callowness. An old woman died after treatment at the clinic, and the coroner hinted that it had been the fault of “our almighty health-officer’s pet cub assistant.” Somewhere arose the name “the Schoolboy Czar” for Martin, and it stuck.
In the gossip at luncheon clubs, in discussions at the Parents’ and Teachers’ Association, in one frank signed protest sent to the Mayor, Martin was blamed for too strict an inspection of milk, for insufficiently strict inspection of milk; for permitting garbage to lie untouched, for persecuting the overworked garbage collectors; and when a case of small-pox appeared in the Bohemian section, there was an opinion that Martin had gone out personally and started it.
However vague the citizens were as to the nature of his wickedness, once they lost faith in him they lost it completely and with joy, and they welcomed an apparently spontaneously generated rumor that he had betrayed his benefactor, their beloved Dr. Pickerbaugh, by seducing Orchid.
At this interesting touch of immorality, he had all the fashionable churches against him. The pastor of the Jonathan Edwards Church touched up a sermon about Sin in High Places by a reference to “one who, while like a Czar he pretends to be safeguarding the city from entirely imaginary dangers, yet winks at the secret vice rampant in hidden places; who allies himself with the forces of graft and evil and the thugs who batten on honest but deluded Labor; one who cannot arise, a manly man among men, and say, ‘I have a clean heart and clean hands.’”
It is true that some of the delighted congregation thought that this referred to Mayor Pugh, and others applied it to F. X. Jordan, but wise citizens saw that it was a courageous attack on that monster of treacherous lewdness, Dr. Arrowsmith.
In all the city there were exactly two ministers who defended him: Father Costello of the Irish Catholic Church, and Rabbi Rovine. They were, it happened, very good friends, and not at all friendly with the pastor of the Jonathan Edwards Church. They bullied their congregations; each of them asserted, “People come sneaking around with criticisms of our new Director of Health. If you want to make charges, make them openly. I will not listen to cowardly hints. And let me tell you that this city is lucky in having for health-officer a man who is honest and who actually knows something!”
But their congregations were poor.
Martin realized that he was lost. He tried to analyze his unpopularity.
“It isn’t just Jordan’s plotting and Tredgold’s grousing and Pugh’s weak spine. It’s my own fault. I can’t go out andsoft-soap the people and get their permission to help keep them well. And I won’t tell them what a hell of an important thing my work is—that I’m the one thing that saves the whole lot of ’em from dying immediately. Apparently an official in a democratic state has to do those things. Well, I don’t! But I’ve got to think up something or they’ll emasculate the whole Department.”
One inspiration he did have. If Pickerbaugh were here, he could crush, or lovingly smother, the opposition. He remembered Pickerbaugh’s farewell: “Now, my boy, even if I’m way off there in Washington, this Work will be as close to my heart as it ever was, and if you should really need me, you just send for me and I’ll drop everything and come.”
Martin wrote hinting that he was very much needed.
Pickerbaugh replied by return mail—good old Pickerbaugh!—but the reply was, “I cannot tell you how grieved I am that I cannot for the moment possibly get away from Washington but am sure that in your earnestness you exaggerate strength of opposition, write me freely, at any time.”
“That’s my last shot,” Martin said to Leora. “I’m done. Mayor Pugh will fire me, just as soon as he comes back from his fishing trip. I’m a failure again, darling.”
“You’re not a failure, and you must eat some of this nice steak, and what shall we do now—time for us to be moving on, anyway— I hate staying in one place,” said Leora.
“I don’t know what we’ll do. Maybe I could get a job at Hunziker’s. Or go back to Dakota and try to work up a practise. What I’d like is to become a farmer and get me a big shot-gun and drive every earnest Christian citizen off the place. But meantime I’m going to stick here. I might win yet—with just a couple of miracles and a divine intervention. Oh, God, I am so tired! Are you coming back to the lab with me this evening? Honest, I’ll quit early—before eleven, maybe.”
He had completed his paper on the streptolysin research, and he took a day off to go to Chicago and talk it over with an editor of theJournal of Infectious Diseases. As he left Nautilus he was confused. He had caught himself rejoicing that he was free of Wheatsylvania and bound for great Nautilus. Time bent back, progress was annihilated, and he was mazed with futility.
The editor praised his paper, accepted it, and suggested only one change. Martin had to wait for his train. He rememberedthat Angus Duer was in Chicago, with the Rouncefield Clinic—a private organization of medical specialists, sharing costs and profits.
The clinic occupied fourteen rooms in a twenty-story building constructed (or so Martin certainly remembered it) of marble, gold, and rubies. The clinic reception-room, focused on a vast stone fireplace, was like the drawing-room of an oil magnate, but it was not a place of leisure. The young woman at the door demanded Martin’s symptoms and address. A page in buttons sped with his name to a nurse, who flew to the inner offices. Before Angus appeared, Martin had to wait a quarter-hour in a smaller, richer, still more abashing reception-room. But this time he was so awed that he would have permitted the clinic surgeons to operate on him for any ill which at the moment they happened to fancy.
In medical school and Zenith General Hospital, Angus Duer had been efficient enough, but now he was ten times as self-assured. He was cordial; he invited Martin to step out for a dish of tea as though he almost meant it; but beside him Martin felt young, rustic, inept.
Angus won him by pondering, “Irving Watters? He was Digam? I’m not sure I remember him. Oh, yes—he was one of these boneheads that are the curse of every profession.”
When Martin had sketched his conflict at Nautilus, Angus suggested, “You better come join us here at Rouncefield, as pathologist. Our pathologist is leaving in a few weeks. You could do the job, all right. You’re getting thirty-five hundred a year now? Well, I think I could get you forty-five hundred, as a starter, and some day you’d become a regular member of the clinic and get in on all the profits. Let me know if you want it. Rouncefield told me to dig up a man.”
With this resource and with an affection for Angus, Martin returned to Nautilus and open war. When Mayor Pugh returned he did not discharge Martin, but he appointed over him, as full Director, Pickerbaugh’s friend, Dr. Bissex, the football coach and health director of Mugford College.
Dr. Bissex first discharged Rufus Ockford, which took five minutes, went out and addressed a Y. M. C. A. meeting, then bustled in and invited Martin to resign.
“I will like hell!” said Martin. “Come on, be honest, Bissex. If you want to fire me, do it, but let’s have things straight. I won’t resign, and if you do fire me I think I’ll takeit to the courts, and maybe I can turn enough light on you and His Honor and Frank Jordan to keep you from taking all the guts out of the work here.”
“Why, Doctor, what a way to talk! Certainly I won’t fire you,” said Bissex, in the manner of one who has talked to difficult students and to lazy football teams. “Stay with us as long as you like. Only, in the interests of economy, I reduce your salary to eight hundred dollars a year!”
“All right, reduce and be damned,” said Martin.
It sounded particularly fine and original when he said it, but less so when Leora and he found that, with their rent fixed by their lease, they could not by whatever mean economies live on less than a thousand a year.
Now that he was free from responsibility he began to form his own faction, to save the Department. He gathered Rabbi Rovine, Father Costello, Ockford, who was going to remain in town and practise, the secretary of the Labor Council, a banker who regarded Tredgold as “fast,” and that excellent fellow the dentist of the school clinic.
“With people like that behind me, I can do something,” he gloated to Leora. “I’m going to stick by it. I’m not going to have the D. P. H. turned into a Y. M. C. A. Bissex has all of Pickerbaugh’s mush without his honesty and vigor. I can beat him! I’m not much of an executive, but I was beginning to visualize a D. P. H. that would be solid and not gaseous—that would save kids and prevent epidemics. I won’t give it up. You watch me!”
His committee made representations to the Commercial Club, and for a time they were certain that the chief reporter of theFrontiersmanwas going to support them, “as soon as he could get his editor over being scared of a row.” But Martin’s belligerency was weakened by shame, for he never had enough money to meet his bills, and he was not used to dodging irate grocers, receiving dunning letters, standing at the door arguing with impertinent bill-collectors. He, who had been a city dignitary a few days before, had to endure, “Come on now, you pay up, you dead beat, or I’ll get a cop!” When the shame had grown to terror, Dr. Bissex suddenly reduced his salary another two hundred dollars.
Martin stormed into the mayor’s office to have it out, and found F. X. Jordan sitting with Pugh. It was evident thatthey both knew of the second reduction and considered it an excellent joke.
He reassembled his committee. “I’m going to take this into the courts,” he raged.
“Fine,” said Father Costello; and Rabbi Rovine: “Jenkins, that radical lawyer, would handle the case free.”
The wise banker observed, “You haven’t got anything to take into the courts till they discharge you without cause. Bissex has a legal right to reduce your salary all he wants to. The city regulations don’t fix the salary for anybody except the Director and the inspectors. You haven’t a thing to say.”
With a melodramatic flourish Martin protested, “And I suppose I haven’t a thing to say if they wreck the Department!”
“Not a thing, if the city doesn’t care.”
“Well, I care! I’ll starve before I’ll resign!”
“You’ll starve if you don’t resign, and your wife, too. Now here’s my plan,” said the banker. “You go into private practise here— I’ll finance your getting an office and so on—and when the time comes, maybe in five or ten years from now, we’ll all get together again and have you put in as full Director.”
“Ten years of waiting—inNautilus? Nope. I’m licked. I’m a complete failure—at thirty-two! I’ll resign. I’ll wander on,” said Martin.
“I know I’m going to love Chicago,” said Leora.
He wrote to Angus Duer. He was appointed pathologist in the Rouncefield Clinic. But, Angus wrote, “they could not at the moment see their way clear to pay him forty-five hundred a year, though they were glad to go to twenty-five hundred.”
Martin accepted.
When the Nautilus papers announced that Martin had resigned, the good citizens chuckled, “Resigned? He got kicked out, that’s what happened.” One of the papers had an innocent squib: