Weekly Meredy.com E-book - Arrowsmith - Part One

I love reading the books on which many classic flicks are based. In fact, I collect them. I thought you might like to read them, too. So, I'm starting something new. A free classic movie-related e-book will be featured weekly on my blog. And there will be a surprise waiting for you at the end of each book. :)

For today, I've chosen an old favorite of mine: Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis.

Sinclair Lewis (Harry Sinclair Lewis)(February 7 1885 – January 10 1951) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters." His works are known for their insightful and critical views of American society and capitalist values, as well as their strong characterizations of modern working women.

As early as 1916, Lewis began taking notes for a realistic novel about small-town life. Work on that novel continued through mid-1920, when he completed Main Street which was published on October 23, 1920. As his biographer Mark Schorer wrote, the phenomenal success of Main Street "was the most sensational event in twentieth-century American publishing history." Based on sales of his prior books, Lewis's most optimistic projection was a sale of 25,000 copies. In the first six months of 1921 alone, Main Street sold 180,000 copies, and within a few years sales were estimated at two million. According to Richard Lingeman "Main Street earned Sinclair Lewis about three million current [2002] dollars."

He followed up this first great success with Babbitt (1922), a novel that satirized the American commercial culture and boosterism. The story was set in the fictional Zenith, Winnemac, a setting Lewis would return to in future novels, including Gideon Planish and Dodsworth.

Lewis' success in the 1920s continued with Arrowsmith (1925), a novel about an idealistic doctor which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize (which he refused). Elmer Gantry (1927), which depicted evangelicalism as hypocritical, was denounced by religious leaders and was banned in some U.S. cities. Lewis closed out the decade with Dodsworth (1929), a novel about the most affluent and successful members of American society leading essentially pointless lives in spite of their great wealth and advantages.

In 1930, Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature in his first year of nomination. In the Swedish Academy's presentation speech, special attention was paid to Babbitt. In his Nobel Lecture, he praised Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and other contemporaries, but also lamented that "in America most of us — not readers alone, but even writers — are still afraid of any literature which is not a glorification of everything American, a glorification of our faults as well as our virtues," and that America is "the most contradictory, the most depressing, the most stirring, of any land in the world today."

Arrowsmith is a novel by American author and playwright Sinclair Lewis that was published in 1925. It won the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for Lewis but he refused to accept it. Lewis was greatly assisted in its preparation by science writer Dr. Paul de Kruif, who received 25% of the royalties on sales, but Lewis is listed as sole author. Arrowsmith is arguably the earliest major novel to deal with the culture of science.

The book's only theatrically released adaptation, made in 1931, featured Ronald Colman and Helen Hayes as Arrowsmith and Leora respectively. It was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Adapted Screenplay.

Spencer Tracy and Fay Wray starred in the Lux Radio Theater version on October 25, 1937.

Helen Hayes reprised her role as Leora in an hour long adaptation on the Campbell Playhouse radio program along with Orson Welles as Arrowsmith. The program aired on February 3, 1939.





A Meredy.com E-book

Title: Arrowsmith (1925)
Author: Sinclair Lewis
Edition: 1
Language: English
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Date first posted: March 2009
Date most recently updated: March 2009

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---

Arrowsmith (1925)
By
Sinclair Lewis

Chapter 1



The  driver  of  the wagon swaying through forest and swamp of the Ohio wilderness was a ragged girl of fourteen. Her mother they had buried near
the Monongahela--the girl herself had heaped with torn sods the grave beside the river of the beautiful name. Her father lay shrinking with fever
on the floor of the wagon-box, and about him played her brothers and sisters, dirty brats, tattered brats, hilarious brats.

She  halted at the fork in the grassy road, and the sick man quavered, "Emmy, ye better turn down towards Cincinnati. If we could find your Uncle
Ed, I guess he'd take us in."

"Nobody  ain't  going  to  take  us  in," she said. "We're going on jus' long as we can. Going West! They's a whole lot of new things I aim to be
seeing!"

She cooked the supper, she put the children to bed, and sat by the fire, alone.

That was the great-grandmother of Martin Arrowsmith.



II


Cross-legged  in the examining-chair in Doc Vickerson's office, a boy was reading "Gray's Anatomy." His name was Martin Arrowsmith, of Elk Mills,
in the state of Winnemac.

There  was  a  suspicion in Elk Mills--now, in 1897, a dowdy red-brick village, smelling of apples--that this brown-leather adjustable seat which
Doc  Vickerson  used  for minor operations, for the infrequent pulling of teeth and for highly frequent naps, had begun life as a barber's chair.
There  was  also  a  belief  that  its proprietor must once have been called Doctor Vickerson, but for years he had been only The Doc, and he was
scurfier and much less adjustable than the chair.

Martin  was the son of J. J. Arrowsmith, who conducted the New York Clothing Bazaar. By sheer brass and obstinacy he had, at fourteen, become the
unofficial,  also  decidedly  unpaid, assistant to the Doc, and while the Doc was on a country call he took charge--though what there was to take
charge  of, no one could ever make out. He was a slender boy, not very tall; his hair and restless eyes were black, his skin unusually white, and
the  contrast  gave  him  an  air  of passionate variability. The squareness of his head and a reasonable breadth of shoulders saved him from any
appearance  of effeminacy or of that querulous timidity which artistic young gentlemen call Sensitiveness. When he lifted his head to listen, his
right  eyebrow,  slightly higher than the left, rose and quivered in his characteristic expression of energy, of independence, and a hint that he
could fight, a look of impertinent inquiry which had been known to annoy his teachers and the Sunday School superintendent.

Martin  was,  like most inhabitants of Elk Mills before the Slavo-Italian immigration, a Typical Pure-bred Anglo-Saxon American, which means that
he was a union of German, French, Scotch, Irish, perhaps a little Spanish, conceivably a little of the strains lumped together as "Jewish," and a
great deal of English, which is itself a combination of primitive Briton, Celt, Phoenician, Roman, German, Dane, and Swede.

It  is  not  certain  that,  in  attaching  himself to Doc Vickerson, Martin was entirely and edifyingly controlled by a desire to become a Great
Healer.  He  did awe his Gang by bandaging stone-bruises, dissecting squirrels, and explaining the astounding and secret matters to be discovered
at  the back of the physiology, but he was not completely free from an ambition to command such glory among them as was enjoyed by the son of the
Episcopalian minister, who could smoke an entire cigar without becoming sick. Yet this afternoon he read steadily at the section on the lymphatic
system, and he muttered the long and perfectly incomprehensible words in a hum which made drowsier the dusty room.

It  was  the central room of the three occupied by Doc Vickerson, facing on Main Street above the New York Clothing Bazaar. On one side of it was
the  foul  waiting-room,  on  the other, the Doc's bedroom. He was an aged widower; for what he called "female fixings" he cared nothing; and the
bedroom with its tottering bureau and its cot of frowsy blankets was cleaned only by Martin, in not very frequent attacks of sanitation.

This  central  room was at once business office, consultation-room, operating-theater, living-room, poker den, and warehouse for guns and fishing
tackle.  Against  a  brown  plaster  wall  was  a  cabinet of zoological collections and medical curiosities, and beside it the most dreadful and
fascinating  object  known  to  the boy-world of Elk Mills--a skeleton with one gaunt gold tooth. On evenings when the Doc was away, Martin would
acquire prestige among the trembling Gang by leading them into the unutterable darkness and scratching a sulfur match on the skeleton's jaw.

On the wall was a home-stuffed pickerel on a home-varnished board. Beside the rusty stove, a sawdust-box cuspidor rested on a slimy oilcloth worn
through to the threads. On the senile table was a pile of memoranda of debts which the Doc was always swearing he would "collect from those dead-
beats  right  now,"  and which he would never, by any chance, at any time, collect from any of them. A year or two--a decade or two--a century or
two--they were all the same to the plodding doctor in the bee-murmuring town.

The  most  unsanitary  corner  was  devoted  to the cast-iron sink, which was oftener used for washing eggy breakfast plates than for sterilizing
instruments. On its ledge were a broken test-tube, a broken fishhook, an unlabeled and forgotten bottle of pills, a nail-bristling heel, a frayed
cigar-butt, and a rusty lancet stuck in a potato.

The wild raggedness of the room was the soul and symbol of Doc Vickerson; it was more exciting than the flat-faced stack of shoe-boxes in the New
York Bazaar: it was the lure to questioning and adventure for Martin Arrowsmith.



III


The  boy  raised his head, cocked his inquisitive brow. On the stairway was the cumbersome step of Doc Vickerson. The Doc was sober! Martin would
not have to help him into bed.

But  it  was a bad sign that the Doc should first go down the hall to his bedroom. The boy listened sharply. He heard the Doc open the lower part
of  the  washstand,  where he kept his bottle of Jamaica rum. After a long gurgle the invisible Doc put away the bottle and decisively kicked the
doors  shut.  Still  good.  Only  one  drink.  If  he came into the consultation-room at once, he would be safe. But he was still standing in the
bedroom. Martin sighed as the washstand doors were hastily opened again, as he heard another gurgle and a third.

The  Doc's  step  was much livelier when he loomed into the office, a gray mass of a man with a gray mass of mustache, a form vast and unreal and
undefined,  like  a  cloud  taking for the moment a likeness of humanity. With the brisk attack of one who wishes to escape the discussion of his
guilt, the Doc rumbled while he waddled toward his desk-chair:

"What  you doing here, young fella? What you doing here? I knew the cat would drag in something if I left the door unlocked." He gulped slightly;
he smiled to show that he was being humorous--people had been known to misconstrue the Doc's humor.

He spoke more seriously, occasionally forgetting what he was talking about:

"Reading  old  Gray?  That's right. Physician's library just three books: 'Gray's Anatomy' and Bible and Shakespeare. Study. You may become great
doctor.  Locate  in  Zenith  and  make  five  thousand  dollars year--much as United States Senator! Set a high goal. Don't let things slide. Get
training. Go college before go medical school. Study. Chemistry. Latin. Knowledge! I'm plug doc--got chick nor child--nobody--old drunk. But you-
-leadin' physician. Make five thousand dollars year.

"Murray  woman's  got  endocarditis.  Not  thing I can do for her. Wants somebody hold her hand. Road's damn' disgrace. Culvert's out, beyond the
grove. 'Sgrace.

"Endocarditis and--

"Training,  that's  what  you  got t' get. Fundamentals. Know chemistry. Biology. I nev' did. Mrs. Reverend Jones thinks she's got gastric ulcer.
Wants to go city for operation. Ulcer, hell! She and the Reverend both eat too much.

"Why they don't repair that culvert--And don't be a booze-hoister like me, either. And get your basic science. I'll splain."

The  boy,  normal village youngster though he was, given to stoning cats and to playing pom-pom-pullaway, gained something of the intoxication of
treasure-hunting  as  the  Doc  struggled to convey his vision of the pride of learning, the universality of biology, the triumphant exactness of
chemistry.  A  fat  old  man  and  dirty and unvirtuous was the Doc; his grammar was doubtful, his vocabulary alarming, and his references to his
rival,  good  Dr. Needham, were scandalous; yet he invoked in Martin a vision of making chemicals explode with much noise and stink and of seeing
animalcules that no boy in Elk Mills had ever beheld.

The Doc's voice was thickening; he was sunk in his chair, blurry of eye and lax of mouth. Martin begged him to go to bed, but the Doc insisted:

"Don't  need  nap.  No.  Now  you lissen. You don't appreciate but--Old man now. Giving you all I've learned. Show you collection. Only museum in
whole county. Scientif' pioneer."

A  hundred  times  had  Martin  obediently  looked at the specimens in the brown, crackly-varnished bookcase: the beetles and chunks of mica; the
embryo  of  a  two-headed calf, the gallstones removed from a respectable lady whom the Doc enthusiastically named to all visitors. The Doc stood
before the case, waving an enormous but shaky forefinger.

"Looka  that  butterfly.  Name is porthesia chrysorrhoea. Doc Needham couldn't tell you that! He don't know what butterflies are called! He don't
care if you get trained. Remember that name now?" He turned on Martin. "You payin' attention? You interested? HUH? Oh, the devil! Nobody wants to
know about my museum--not a person. Only one in county but--I'm an old failure."

Martin asserted, "Honest, it's slick!"

"Look  here!  Look  here! See that? In the bottle? It's an appendix. First one ever took out 'round here. I did it! Old Doc Vickerson, he did the
first  'pendectomy  in  THIS  neck  of  the woods, you bet! And first museum. It ain't--so big--but it's start. I haven't put away money like Doc
Needham, but I started first c'lection--I started it!"

He  collapsed  in a chair, groaning, "You're right. Got to sleep. All in." But as Martin helped him to his feet he broke away, scrabbled about on
his  desk,  and looked back doubtfully. "Want to give you something--start your training. And remember the old man. Will anybody remember the old
man?"

He  was  holding  out the beloved magnifying glass which for years he had used in botanizing. He watched Martin slip the lens into his pocket, he
sighed, he struggled for something else to say, and silently he lumbered into his bedroom.




Chapter 2



The  state of Winnemac is bounded by Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, and like them it is half Eastern, half Midwestern. There is a feeling
of  New  England in its brick and sycamore villages, its stable industries, and a tradition which goes back to the Revolutionary War. Zenith, the
largest city in the state, was founded in 1792. But Winnemac is Midwestern in its fields of corn and wheat, its red barns and silos, and, despite
the immense antiquity of Zenith, many counties were not settled till 1860.

The  University  of  Winnemac  is at Mohalis, fifteen miles from Zenith. There are twelve thousand students; beside this prodigy Oxford is a tiny
theological  school and Harvard a select college for young gentlemen. The University has a baseball field under glass; its buildings are measured
by  the mile; it hires hundreds of young Doctors of Philosophy to give rapid instruction in Sanskrit, navigation, accountancy, spectacle-fitting,
sanitary  engineering,  Provencal  poetry, tariff schedules, rutabaga-growing, motor-car designing, the history of Voronezh, the style of Matthew
Arnold,  the  diagnosis  of myohypertrophia kymoparalytica, and department-store advertising. Its president is the best money-raiser and the best
after-dinner speaker in the United States; and Winnemac was the first school in the world to conduct its extension courses by radio.

It  is  not  a  snobbish rich-man's college, devoted to leisurely nonsense. It is the property of the people of the state, and what they want--or
what  they  are  told  they want--is a mill to turn out men and women who will lead moral lives, play bridge, drive good cars, be enterprising in
business, and occasionally mention books, though they are not expected to have time to read them. It is a Ford Motor Factory, and if its products
rattle  a little, they are beautifully standardized, with perfectly interchangeable parts. Hourly the University of Winnemac grows in numbers and
influence, and by 1950 one may expect it to have created an entirely new world-civilization, a civilization larger and brisker and purer.



II


In  1904,  when Martin Arrowsmith was an Arts and Science Junior preparing for medical school, Winnemac had but five thousand students yet it was
already brisk.

Martin  was  twenty-one.  He still seemed pale, in contrast to his black smooth hair, but he was a respectable runner, a fair basket-ball center,
and a savage hockey-player. The co-eds murmured that he "looked so romantic," but as this was before the invention of sex and the era of petting-
parties,  they  merely  talked about him at a distance, and he did not know that he could have been a hero of amours. For all his stubbornness he
was  shy.  He was not entirely ignorant of caresses but he did not make an occupation of them. He consorted with men whose virile pride it was to
smoke filthy corncob pipes and to wear filthy sweaters.

The University had become his world. For him Elk Mills did not exist. Doc Vickerson was dead and buried and forgotten; Martin's father and mother
were  dead,  leaving  him  only  enough money for his arts and medical courses. The purpose of life was chemistry and physics and the prospect of
biology next year.

His  idol  was  Professor  Edward  Edwards, head of the department of chemistry, who was universally known as "Encore." Edwards' knowledge of the
history  of  chemistry  was  immense. He could read Arabic, and he infuriated his fellow chemists by asserting that the Arabs had anticipated all
their researches. Himself, Professor Edwards never did researches. He sat before fires and stroked his collie and chuckled in his beard.

This evening Encore was giving one of his small and popular At Home's. He lolled in a brown-corduroy Morris chair, being quietly humorous for the
benefit  of  Martin and half a dozen other fanatical young chemists, and baiting Dr. Norman Brumfit, the instructor in English. The room was full
of heartiness and beer and Brumfit.

Every  university  faculty  must  have  a  Wild  Man  to provide thrills and to shock crowded lecture-rooms. Even in so energetically virtuous an
institution as Winnemac there was one Wild Man, and he was Norman Brumfit. He was permitted, without restriction, to speak of himself as immoral,
agnostic  and  socialistic,  so  long  as  it was universally known that he remained pure, Presbyterian, and Republican. Dr. Brumfit was in form,
tonight. He asserted that whenever a man showed genius, it could be proved that he had Jewish blood. Like all discussions of Judaism at Winnemac,
this led to the mention of Max Gottlieb, professor of bacteriology in the medical school.

Professor  Gottlieb  was  the  mystery  of  the  University.  It  was known that he was a Jew, born and educated in Germany, and that his work on
immunology  had  given him fame in the East and in Europe. He rarely left his small brown weedy house except to return to his laboratory, and few
students  outside  of  his classes had ever identified him, but everyone had heard of his tall, lean, dark aloofness. A thousand fables fluttered
about  him. It was believed that he was the son of a German prince, that he had immense wealth, that he lived as sparsely as the other professors
only  because  he  was doing terrifying and costly experiments which probably had something to do with human sacrifice. It was said that he could
create life in the laboratory, that he could talk to the monkeys which he inoculated, that he had been driven out of Germany as a devil-worshiper
or an anarchist, and that he secretly drank real champagne every evening at dinner.

It  was  the  tradition  that faculty-members did not discuss their colleagues with students, but Max Gottlieb could not be regarded as anybody's
colleague. He was impersonal as the chill northeast wind. Dr. Brumfit rattled:

"I'm sufficiently liberal, I should assume, toward the claims of science, but with a man like Gottlieb--I'm prepared to believe that he knows all
about material forces, but what astounds me is that such a man can be blind to the vital force that creates all others. He says that knowledge is
worthless unless it is proven by rows of figures. Well, when one of you scientific sharks can take the genius of a Ben Jonson and measure it with
a  yardstick,  then I'll admit that we literary chaps, with our doubtless absurd belief in beauty and loyalty and the world o' dreams, are off on
the wrong track!"

Martin  Arrowsmith  was not exactly certain what this meant and he enthusiastically did not care. He was relieved when Professor Edwards from the
midst  of  his  beardedness  and smokiness made a sound curiously like "Oh, hell!" and took the conversation away from Brumfit. Ordinarily Encore
would  have  suggested,  with  amiable  malice, that Gottlieb was a "crapehanger" who wasted time destroying the theories of other men instead of
making  new  ones  of  his  own.  But  tonight, in detestation of such literary playboys as Brumfit, he exalted Gottlieb's long, lonely, failure-
burdened  effort to synthesize antitoxin, and his diabolic pleasure in disproving his own contentions as he would those of Ehrlich or Sir Almroth
Wright.  He  spoke  of  Gottlieb's  great  book, "Immunology," which had been read by seven-ninths of all the men in the world who could possibly
understand it--the number of these being nine.

The  party  ended with Mrs. Edwards' celebrated doughnuts. Martin tramped toward his boarding-house through a veiled spring night. The discussion
of  Gottlieb had roused him to a reasonless excitement. He thought of working in a laboratory at night, alone, absorbed, contemptuous of academic
success  and  of popular classes. Himself, he believed, he had never seen the man, but he knew that Gottlieb's laboratory was in the Main Medical
Building. He drifted toward the distant medical campus. The few people whom he met were hurrying with midnight timidity. He entered the shadow of
the  Anatomy  Building,  grim as a barracks, still as the dead men lying up there in the dissecting-room. Beyond him was the turreted bulk of the
Main  Medical  Building, a harsh and blurry mass, high up in its dark wall a single light. He started. The light had gone out abruptly, as though
an agitated watcher were trying to hide from him.

On  the  stone  steps  of  the Main Medical, two minutes after, appeared beneath the arc-light a tall figure, ascetic, self-contained, apart. His
swart  cheeks  were  gaunt,  his  nose high-bridged and thin. He did not hurry, like the belated home-bodies. He was unconscious of the world. He
looked  at  Martin and through him; he moved away, muttering to himself, his shoulders stooped, his long hands clasped behind him. He was lost in
the shadows, himself a shadow.

He  had worn the threadbare top-coat of a poor professor, yet Martin remembered him as wrapped in a black velvet cape with a silver star arrogant
on his breast.



III


On his first day in medical school, Martin Arrowsmith was in a high state of superiority. As a medic he was more picturesque than other students,
for  medics  are reputed to know secrets, horrors, exhilarating wickednesses. Men from the other departments go to their rooms to peer into their
books.  But  also  as  an academic graduate, with a training in the basic sciences, he felt superior to his fellow medics, most of whom had but a
high-school diploma, with perhaps one year in a ten-room Lutheran college among the cornfields.

For all his pride, Martin was nervous. He thought of operating, of making a murderous wrong incision; and with a more immediate, macabre fear, he
thought  of  the  dissecting-room  and the stony, steely Anatomy Building. He had heard older medics mutter of its horrors: of corpses hanging by
hooks,  like  rows of ghastly fruit, in an abominable tank of brine in the dark basement; of Henry the janitor, who was said to haul the cadavers
out of the brine, to inject red lead into their veins, and to scold them as he stuffed them on the dumb-waiter.

There  was  prairie  freshness in the autumn day but Martin did not heed. He hurried into the slate-colored hall of the Main Medical, up the wide
stairs  to the office of Max Gottlieb. He did not look at passing students, and when he bumped into them he grunted in confused apology. It was a
portentous  hour.  He  was  going  to  specialize in bacteriology; he was going to discover enchanting new germs; Professor Gottlieb was going to
recognize him as a genius, make him an assistant, predict for him--He halted in Gottlieb's private laboratory, a small, tidy apartment with racks
of  cotton-corked  test-tubes on the bench, a place unimpressive and unmagical save for the constant-temperature bath with its tricky thermometer
and  electric  bulbs.  He waited till another student, a stuttering gawk of a student, had finished talking to Gottlieb, dark, lean, impassive at
his desk in a cubbyhole of an office, then he plunged.

If  in  the  misty April night Gottlieb had been romantic as a cloaked horseman, he was now testy and middle-aged. Near at hand, Martin could see
wrinkles  beside  the  hawk  eyes.  Gottlieb  had turned back to his desk, which was heaped with shabby note-books, sheets of calculations, and a
marvelously  precise chart with red and green curves descending to vanish at zero. The calculations were delicate, minute, exquisitely clear; and
delicate  were  the  scientist's  thin  hands  among  the  papers.  He  looked up, spoke with a hint of German accent. His words were not so much
mispronounced as colored with a warm unfamiliar tint.

"Vell? Yes?"

"Oh,  Professor  Gottlieb,  my name is Arrowsmith. I'm a medic freshman, Winnemac B.A. I'd like awfully to take bacteriology this fall instead of
next year. I've had a lot of chemistry--"

"No. It is not time for you."

"Honest, I know I could do it now."

"There  are  two kinds of students the gods give me. One kind they dump on me like a bushel of potatoes. I do not like potatoes, and the potatoes
they  do  not ever seem to have great affection for me, but I take them and teach them to kill patients. The other kind--they are very few!--they
seem  for  some  reason that is not at all clear to me to wish a liddle bit to become scientists, to work with bugs and make mistakes. Those, ah,
those,  I  seize  them,  I  denounce them, I teach them right away the ultimate lesson of science, which is to wait and doubt. Of the potatoes, I
demand  nothing; of the foolish ones like you, who think I could teach them something, I demand everything. No. You are too young. Come back next
year."

"But honestly, with my chemistry--"

"Have you taken physical chemistry?"

"No, sir, but I did pretty well in organic."

"Organic chemistry! Puzzle chemistry! Stink chemistry! Drugstore chemistry! Physical chemistry is power, it is exactness, it is life. But organic
chemistry--that is a trade for pot-washers. No. You are too young. Come back in a year."

Gottlieb  was absolute. His talon fingers waved Martin to the door, and the boy hastened out, not daring to argue. He slunk off in misery. On the
campus  he  met  that  jovial  historian  of  chemistry, Encore Edwards, and begged, "Say, Professor, tell me, is there any value for a doctor in
organic chemistry?"

"Value?  Why, it seeks the drugs that allay pain! It produces the paint that slicks up your house, it dyes your sweetheart's dress--and maybe, in
these degenerate days, her cherry lips! Who the dickens has been talking scandal about my organic chemistry?"

"Nobody.  I  was just wondering," Martin complained, and he drifted to the College Inn where, in an injured and melancholy manner, he devoured an
enormous banana-split and a bar of almond chocolate, as he meditated:

"I want to take bacteriology. I want to get down to the bottom of this disease stuff. I'll learn some physical chemistry. I'll show old Gottlieb,
damn  him!  Some  day I'll discover the germ of cancer or something, and then he'll look foolish in the face! . . . Oh, Lord, I hope I won't take
sick, first time I go into the dissecting-room. . . . I want to take bacteriology--now!"

He  recalled Gottlieb's sardonic face; he felt and feared his quality of dynamic hatred. Then he remembered the wrinkles, and he saw Max Gottlieb
not as a genius but as a man who had headaches, who became agonizingly tired, who could be loved.

"I wonder if Encore Edwards knows as much as I thought he did? What IS Truth?" he puzzled.



IV


Martin  was  jumpy  on his first day of dissecting. He could not look at the inhumanly stiff faces of the starveling gray men lying on the wooden
tables.  But they were so impersonal, these lost old men, that in two days he was, like the other medics, calling them "Billy" and "Ike" and "the
Parson,"  and  regarding  them as he had regarded animals in biology. The dissecting-room itself was impersonal: hard cement floor, walls of hard
plaster  between wire-glass windows. Martin detested the reek of formaldehyde; that and some dreadful subtle other odor seemed to cling about him
outside  the  dissecting-room; but he smoked cigarettes to forget it, and in a week he was exploring arteries with youthful and altogether unholy
joy.

His dissecting partner was the Reverend Ira Hinkley, known to the class by a similar but different name.

Ira  was going to be a medical missionary. He was a man of twenty-nine, a graduate of Pottsburg Christian College and of the Sanctification Bible
and  Missions School. He had played football; he was as strong and nearly as large as a steer, and no steer ever bellowed more enormously. He was
a  bright  and  happy  Christian,  a  romping  optimist  who laughed away sin and doubt, a joyful Puritan who with annoying virility preached the
doctrine  of  his  tiny sect, the Sanctification Brotherhood, that to have a beautiful church was almost as damnable as the debaucheries of card-
playing.

Martin  found  himself  viewing  "Billy,"  their cadaver--an undersized, blotchy old man with a horrible little red beard on his petrified, vealy
face--as  a  machine,  fascinating, complex, beautiful, but a machine. It damaged his already feeble belief in man's divinity and immortality. He
might  have  kept his doubts to himself, revolving them slowly as he dissected out the nerves of the mangled upper arm, but Ira Hinkley would not
let  him  alone.  Ira believed that he could bring even medical students to bliss, which, to Ira, meant singing extraordinarily long and unlovely
hymns in a chapel of the Sanctification Brotherhood.

"Mart,  my  son," he roared, "do you realize that in this, what some might call a sordid task, we are learning things that will enable us to heal
the bodies and comfort the souls of countless lost unhappy folks?"

"Huh! Souls. I haven't found one yet in old Billy. Honest, do you believe that junk?"

Ira clenched his fist and scowled, then belched with laughter, slapped Martin distressingly on the back, and clamored, "Brother, you've got to do
better  than  that to get Ira's goat! You think you've got a lot of these fancy Modern Doubts. You haven't--you've only got indigestion. What you
need  is  exercise  and faith. Come on over to the Y.M.C.A. and I'll take you for a swim and pray with you. Why, you poor skinny little agnostic,
here  you  have  a  chance  to  see  the  Almighty's  handiwork,  and  all you grab out of it is a feeling that you're real smart. Buck up, young
Arrowsmith. You don't know how funny you are, to a fellow that's got a serene faith!"

To  the delight of Clif Clawson, the class jester, who worked at the next table, Ira chucked Martin in the ribs, patted him, very painfully, upon
the head, and amiably resumed work, while Martin danced with irritation.



V


In  college  Martin  had  been  a  "barb"--he  had  not  belonged to a Greek Letter secret society. He had been "rushed," but he had resented the
condescension  of  the  aristocracy  of  men  from the larger cities. Now that most of his Arts classmates had departed to insurance offices, law
schools, and banks, he was lonely, and tempted by an invitation from Digamma Pi, the chief medical fraternity.

Digamma  Pi  was a lively boarding-house with a billiard table and low prices. Rough and amiable noises came from it at night, and a good deal of
singing  about  When  I  Die  Don't Bury Me at All; yet for three years Digams had won the valedictory and the Hugh Loizeau Medal in Experimental
Surgery.  This  autumn  the  Digams elected Ira Hinkley, because they had been gaining a reputation for dissipation--girls were said to have been
smuggled  in  late  at night--and no company which included the Reverend Mr. Hinkley could possibly be taken by the Dean as immoral, which was an
advantage if they were to continue comfortably immoral.

Martin had prized the independence of his solitary room. In a fraternity, all tennis rackets, trousers, and opinions are held in common. When Ira
found  that  Martin  was  hesitating,  he  insisted, "Oh, come on in! Digam needs you. You do study hard--I'll say that for you--and think what a
chance you'll have to influence The Fellows for good."

(On all occasions, Ira referred to his classmates as The Fellows, and frequently he used the term in prayers at the Y.M.C.A.)

"I don't want to influence anybody. I want to learn the doctor trade and make six thousand dollars a year."

"My boy, if you only knew how foolish you sound when you try to be cynical! When you're as old as I am, you'll understand that the glory of being
a doctor is that you can teach folks high ideals while you soothe their tortured bodies."

"Suppose they don't want my particular brand of high ideals?"

"Mart, have I got to stop and pray with you?"

"No!  Quit!  Honestly, Hinkley, of all the Christians I ever met you take the rottenest advantages. You can lick anybody in the class, and when I
think  of  how  you're  going to bully the poor heathen when you get to be a missionary, and make the kids put on breeches, and marry off all the
happy lovers to the wrong people, I could bawl!"

The  prospect  of  leaving  his  sheltered den for the patronage of the Reverend Mr. Hinkley was intolerable. It was not till Angus Duer accepted
election to Digamma Pi that Martin himself came in.

Duer  was  one of the few among Martin's classmates in the academic course who had gone on with him to the Winnemac medical school. Duer had been
the  valedictorian.  He was a silent, sharp-faced, curly-headed, rather handsome young man, and he never squandered an hour or a good impulse. So
brilliant  was  his  work in biology and chemistry that a Chicago surgeon had promised him a place in his clinic. Martin compared Angus Duer to a
razor  blade  on  a  January  morning;  he  hated him, was uncomfortable with him, and envied him. He knew that in biology Duer had been too busy
passing  examinations  to  ponder,  to  get  any  concept  of  biology as a whole. He knew that Duer was a tricky chemist, who neatly and swiftly
completed the experiments demanded by the course and never ventured on original experiments which, leading him into a confused land of wondering,
might  bring  him to glory or disaster. He was sure that Duer cultivated his manner of chill efficiency to impress instructors. Yet the man stood
out  so  bleakly  from  a  mass  of  students  who could neither complete their experiments nor ponder nor do anything save smoke pipes and watch
football-practice that Martin loved him while he hated him, and almost meekly he followed him into Digamma Pi.

Martin,  Ira  Hinkley,  Angus Duer, Clif Clawson, the meaty class jester, and one "Fatty" Pfaff were initiated into Digamma Pi together. It was a
noisy  and  rather painful performance, which included smelling asafetida. Martin was bored, but Fatty Pfaff was in squeaking, billowing, gasping
terror.

Fatty  was  of  all  the new Freshmen candidates the most useful to Digamma Pi. He was planned by nature to be a butt. He looked like a distended
hot-water bottle; he was magnificently imbecile; he believed everything, he knew nothing, he could memorize nothing; and anxiously he forgave the
men  who  got through the vacant hours by playing jokes upon him. They persuaded him that mustard plasters were excellent for colds--solicitously
they  gathered  about  him,  affixed an enormous plaster to his back, and afterward fondly removed it. They concealed the ear of a cadaver in his
nice,  clean,  new  pocket  handkerchief  when  he went to Sunday supper at the house of a girl cousin in Zenith. . . . At supper he produced the
handkerchief with a flourish.

Every night when Fatty retired he had to remove from his bed a collection of objects which thoughtful house-mates had stuffed between the sheets-
-soap,  alarm  clocks,  fish.  He  was the perfect person to whom to sell useless things. Clif Clawson, who combined a brisk huckstering with his
jokes,  sold  to  Fatty  for  four  dollars a History of Medicine which he had bought, second-hand, for two, and while Fatty never read it, never
conceivably  could  read it, the possession of the fat red book made him feel learned. But Fatty's greatest beneficence to Digamma was his belief
in  spiritualism. He went about in terror of spooks. He was always seeing them emerging at night from the dissecting-room windows. His classmates
took care that he should behold a great many of them flitting about the halls of the fraternity.



VI


Digamma Pi was housed in a residence built in the expansive days of 1885. The living-room suggested a recent cyclone. Knife-gashed tables, broken
Morris  chairs,  and  torn rugs were flung about the room, and covered with backless books, hockey shoes, caps, and cigarette stubs. Above, there
were four men to a bedroom, and the beds were iron double-deckers, like a steerage.

For ash-trays the Digams used sawed skulls, and on the bedroom walls were anatomical charts, to be studied while dressing. In Martin's room was a
complete  skeleton. He and his roommates had trustingly bought it from a salesman who came out from a Zenith surgical supply house. He was such a
genial and sympathetic salesman; he gave them cigars and told G. U. stories and explained what prosperous doctors they were all going to be. They
bought the skeleton gratefully, on the installment plan. . . . Later the salesman was less genial.

Martin roomed with Clif Clawson, Fatty Pfaff, and an earnest second-year medic named Irving Watters.

Any psychologist desiring a perfectly normal man for use in demonstrations could not have done better than to have engaged Irving Watters. He was
always  and carefully dull; smilingly, easily, dependably dull. If there was any cliche which he did not use, it was because he had not yet heard
it.  He  believed  in  morality--except  on  Saturday  evenings; he believed in the Episcopal Church--but not the High Church; he believed in the
Constitution, Darwinism, systematic exercise in the gymnasium, and the genius of the president of the university.

Among  them,  Martin  most  liked Clif Clawson. Clif was the clown of the fraternity house, he was given to raucous laughter, he clogged and sang
meaningless  songs,  he  even practiced on the cornet, yet he was somehow a good fellow and solid, and Martin, in his detestation of Ira Hinkley,
his  fear  of  Angus  Duer,  his  pity for Fatty Pfaff, his distaste for the amiable dullness of Irving Watters, turned to the roaring Clif as to
something  living  and  experimenting. At least Clif had reality; the reality of a plowed field, of a steaming manure-pile. It was Clif who would
box with him; Clif who--though he loved to sit for hours smoking, grunting, magnificently loafing--could be persuaded to go for a five-mile walk.

And it was Clif who risked death by throwing baked beans at the Reverend Ira Hinkley at supper, when Ira was bulkily and sweetly corrective.

In  the  dissecting-room  Ira  was  maddening enough with his merriment at such of Martin's ideas as had not been accepted in Pottsburg Christian
College,  but  in  the  fraternity-house  he  was  a moral pest. He never ceased trying to stop their profanity. After three years on a backwoods
football  team  he  still believed with unflinching optimism that he could sterilize young men by administering reproofs, with the nickering of a
lady Sunday School teacher and the delicacy of a charging elephant.

Ira also had statistics about Clean Living.

He  was  full  of  statistics.  Where  he got them did not matter to him; figures in the daily papers, in the census report, or in the Miscellany
Column of the Sanctification Herald were equally valid. He announced at supper table, "Clif, it's a wonder to me how as bright a fella as you can
go on sucking that dirty old pipe. D'you realize that 67.9 per cent of all women who go to the operating table have husbands who smoke tobacco?"

"What the devil would they smoke?" demanded Clif.

"Where'd you get those figures?" from Martin.

"They  came  out  at  a  medical convention in Philadelphia in 1902," Ira condescended. "Of course I don't suppose it'll make any difference to a
bunch of wise galoots like you that some day you'll marry a nice bright little woman and ruin her life with your vices. Sure, keep right on--fine
brave virile bunch! A poor weakling preacher like me wouldn't dare do anything so brave as smoke a pipe!"

He left them triumphantly, and Martin groaned, "Ira makes me want to get out of medicine and be an honest harness maker."

"Aw, gee now, Mart," Fatty Pfaff complained, "you oughtn't to cuss Ira out. He's awful sincere."

"Sincere? Hell! So is a cockroach!"

Thus  they jabbered, while Angus Duer watched them in a superior silence that made Martin nervous. In the study of the profession to which he had
looked forward all his life he found irritation and vacuity as well as serene wisdom; he saw no one clear path to Truth but a thousand paths to a
thousand truths far-off and doubtful.




Chapter 3



John A. Robertshaw, John Aldington Robertshaw, professor of physiology in the medical school, was rather deaf, and he was the only teacher in the
University of Winnemac who still wore mutton-chop whiskers. He came from Back Bay; he was proud of it and let you know about it. With three other
Brahmins he formed in Mohalis a Boston colony which stood for sturdy sweetness and decorously shaded light. On all occasions he remarked, "When I
was  studying  with  Ludwig  in Germany--" He was too absorbed in his own correctness to heed individual students, and Clif Clawson and the other
young men technically known as "hell-raisers" looked forward to his lectures on physiology.

They  were  held in an amphitheater whose seats curved so far around that the lecturer could not see both ends at once, and while Dr. Robertshaw,
continuing  to  drone  about  blood circulation, was peering to the right to find out who was making that outrageous sound like a motor horn, far
over  on the left Clif Clawson would rise and imitate him, with sawing arm and stroking of imaginary whiskers. Once Clif produced the masterpiece
of  throwing  a  brick into the sink beside the platform, just when Dr. Robertshaw was working up to his annual climax about the effects of brass
bands on the intensity of the knee-jerk.

Martin  had  been reading Max Gottlieb's scientific papers--as much of them as he could read, with their morass of mathematical symbols--and from
them  he  had  a  conviction  that  experiments  should be something dealing with the foundations of life and death, with the nature of bacterial
infection,  with  the  chemistry  of  bodily reactions. When Robertshaw chirped about fussy little experiments, standard experiments, maiden-aunt
experiments,  Martin  was restless. In college he had felt that prosody and Latin Composition were futile, and he had looked forward to the study
of  medicine  as  illumination.  Now,  in  melancholy worry about his own unreasonableness, he found that he was developing the same contempt for
Robertshaw's rules of the thumb--and for most of the work in anatomy.

The  professor of anatomy, Dr. Oliver O. Stout, was himself an anatomy, a dissection-chart, a thinly covered knot of nerves and blood vessels and
bones.  Stout  had  precise  and  enormous  knowledge;  in his dry voice he could repeat more facts about the left little toe than you would have
thought anybody would care to learn regarding the left little toe.

No  discussion  at  the Digamma Pi supper table was more violent than the incessant debate over the value to a doctor, a decent normal doctor who
made  a  good  living  and  did  not worry about reading papers at medical associations, of remembering anatomical terms. But no matter what they
thought,  they  all  ground at learning the lists of names which enable a man to crawl through examinations and become an Educated Person, with a
market  value  of  five  dollars an hour. Unknown sages had invented rimes which enabled them to memorize. At supper--the thirty piratical Digams
sitting  at  a  long  and spotty table, devouring clam chowder and beans and codfish balls and banana layer-cake--the Freshmen earnestly repeated
after a senior:


On old Olympus' topmost top A 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 practicing physicians and altogether forgotten
the names of the nerves themselves.



II


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, because he 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.



III


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'mmercialism 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 what SEEMS true! 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! Tonight 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?"



IV


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?"

"HAS  he! 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 trying to 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! I LOVE her! 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  coeds,  red  cushions,  and  marshmallows,  before he was hurled into hectic studying for the year's final
examinations.



V


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 had to 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, WILL you 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 remember ONE thing, 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
practice 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.



VI


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're simply 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? What DO I want? What AM I going to do?"



VII


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 eyes opened 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'm HERE!" 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 formulae.
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.




Chapter 4



Professor Max Gottlieb was 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 of Bacillus 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 Korpsbruder 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 of Bacillus 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. You MIGHT merely 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, iss 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
teach Dummkopfe? 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 up the 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 accurate QUANTITATIVE notes--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 iss the secret of laboratory skill."



II


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 this killing 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.



III


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  thumbtacks.  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.



IV


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 ticklish to handle. It is
quite  a  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 in the physics of 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 sing Die Wacht am Rhein and 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 lifely Kerl thirty 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 functioning Bacillus typhosus with 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.




Chapter 5



Though  bacteriology  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 wallpaper, 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 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 practice 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, "Where was 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 a post 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 prescriptions BECAUSE I TELL YOU TO! If I did not hesitate to waste the time of the other members of this
class,  I  would try to 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.



II


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 eyeglasses 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 everyone 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 tomorrow evening?'

"Well, I--Perhaps."



III


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.



IV


Fudge  parties,  skating  parties,  sleighing parties, a literary party with the guest of honor a lady journalist who did the social page for the
Zenith  Advocate-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.



V


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 bench like 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 Provencal." 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, tonight. 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, tonight. 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 know what 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 up SOME research. 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 afterwards--Oh, Madeline!"

Then was all reasoning lost in a blur of nearness to her.



VI


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.



VII


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 should YOU be 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, instead of 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.




Chapter 6



The  waiters  at  Nokomis  Lodge,  among  the  Ontario pines, were all of them university students. They were not supposed to appear at the Lodge
dances--they merely appeared, and took the prettiest girls away from the elderly and denunciatory suitors in white flannels. They had to work but
seven hours a day. The rest of the time they fished, swam, and tramped the shadowy trails, and Martin came back to Mohalis placid--and enormously
in love with Madeline.

They  had written to each other, politely, regretfully, and once a fortnight; then passionately and daily. For the summer she had been dragged to
her home town, near the Ohio border of Winnemac, a town larger than Martin's Elk Mills but more sun-baked, more barren with little factories. She
sighed, in a huge loose script dashing all over the page:


Perhaps  we  shall  never  see each other again but I do want you to know how much I prize all the talks we had together about science & ideals &
education,  etc.--I  certainly  appreciate  them  here  when  I  listen  to these stick in the muds going on, oh, it is too dreadful, about their
automobiles  &  how  much  they  have  to pay their maids and so on & so forth. You gave me so much but I did give you something didn't I? I cant
always be in the wrong can I?


"My dear, my little girl!" he lamented. "'Can't always be in the wrong'! You poor kid, you poor dear kid!"

By midsummer they were firmly re-engaged and, though he was slightly disturbed by the cashier, a young and giggling Wisconsin school-teacher with
ankles, he so longed for Madeline that he lay awake thinking of giving up his job and fleeing to her caresses--lay awake for minutes at a time.

The  returning  train  was  torturingly  slow, and he dismounted at Mohalis fevered with visions of her. Twenty minutes after, they were clinging
together  in  the  quiet  of her living room. It is true that twenty minutes after that, she was sneering at Clif Clawson, at fishing, and at all
school-teachers, but to his fury she yielded in tears.



II


His  Junior  year  was a whirlwind. To attend lectures on physical diagnosis, surgery, neurology, obstetrics, and gynecology in the morning, with
hospital  demonstrations  in  the  afternoon; to supervise the making of media and the sterilization of glassware for Gottlieb; to instruct a new
class  in  the  use  of  the  microscope  and  filter  and autoclave; to read a page now and then of scientific German or French; to see Madeline
constantly;  to  get  through it all he drove himself to hysterical hurrying, and in the dizziest of it he began his first original research--his
first lyric, his first ascent of unexplored mountains.

He  had  immunized rabbits to typhoid, and he believed that if he mixed serum taken from these immune animals with typhoid germs, the germs would
die.  Unfortunately--he  felt--the  germs  grew  joyfully.  He  was  troubled;  he  was sure that his technique had been clumsy; he performed his
experiment  over  and  over,  working  till  midnight,  waking  at dawn to ponder on his notes. (Though in letters to Madeline his writing was an
inconsistent  scrawl, in his laboratory notes it was precise.) When he was quite sure that Nature was persisting in doing something she ought not
to, he went guiltily to Gottlieb, protesting, "The darn' bugs ought to die in this immune serum, but they don't. There's something wrong with the
theories."

"Young man, do you set yourself up against science?" grated Gottlieb, flapping the papers on his desk. "Do you feel competent, huh, to attack the
dogmas of immunology?"

"I'm sorry, sir. I can't help what the dogma is. Here's my protocols. Honestly, I've gone over and over the stuff, and I get the same results, as
you can see. I only know what I observe."

Gottlieb  beamed. "I give you, my boy, my episcopal blessings! That is the way! Observe what you observe, and if it does violence to all the nice
correct views of science--out they go! I am very pleast, Martin. But now find out the Why, the underneath principle."

Ordinarily,  Gottlieb called him "Arrowsmith" or "You" or "Uh." When he was furious he called him, or any other student, "Doctor." It was only in
high moments that he honored him with "Martin," and the boy trotted off blissfully, to try to find (but never to succeed in finding) the Why that
made everything so.



III


Gottlieb  had  sent  him  into  Zenith, to the huge Zenith General Hospital, to secure a strain of meningococcus from an interesting patient. The
bored  reception  clerk--who was interested only in obtaining the names, business addresses, and religions of patients, and did not care who died
or  who spat on the beautiful blue and white linoleum or who went about collecting meningococci, so long as the addresses were properly entered--
loftily  told him to go up to Ward D. Through the long hallways, past numberless rooms from which peered yellow-faced old women sitting up in bed
in  linty  nightgowns, Martin wandered, trying to look important, hoping to be taken for a doctor, and succeeding only in feeling extraordinarily
embarrassed.

He passed several nurses rapidly, half nodding to them, in the manner (or what he conceived to be the manner) of a brilliant young surgeon who is
about  to  operate.  He  was  so absorbed in looking like a brilliant young surgeon that he was completely lost, and discovered himself in a wing
filled  with  private suites. He was late. He had no more time to go on being impressive. Like all males, he hated to confess ignorance by asking
directions, but grudgingly he stopped at the door of a bedroom in which a probationer nurse was scrubbing the floor.

She  was a smallish and slender probationer, muffled in a harsh blue denim dress, an enormous white apron, and a turban bound about her head with
an elastic--a uniform as grubby as her pail of scrub-water. She peered up with the alert impudence of a squirrel.

"Nurse," he said, "I want to find Ward D."

Lazily, "Do you?"

"I do! If I can interrupt your work--"

"Doesn't  matter.  The  damn'  superintendent  of  nurses put me at scrubbing, and we aren't ever SUPPOSED to scrub floors, because she caught me
smoking a cigarette. She's an old terror. If she found a child like you wandering around here, she'd drag you out by the ear."

"My DEAR young woman, it may interest you to know--"

"Oh! 'My dear young woman, it may--' Sounds exactly like our old prof, back home."

Her indolent amusement, her manner of treating him as though they were a pair of children making tongues at each other in a railroad station, was
infuriating to the earnest young assistant of Professor Gottlieb.

"I  am  Dr.  Arrowsmith,"  he  snorted,  "and  I've  been  informed  that even probationers learn that the first duty of a nurse is to stand when
addressing  doctors!  I  wish to find Ward D, to take a strain of--IT MAY INTEREST YOU TO KNOW!--a very dangerous microbe, and if you will kindly
direct me--"

"Oh,  gee,  I've been getting fresh again. I don't seem to get along with this military discipline. All right. I'll stand up." She did. Her every
movement  was  swiftly smooth as the running of a cat. "You go back, turn right, then left. I'm sorry I was fresh. But if you saw some of the old
muffs of doctors that a nurse has to be meek to--Honestly, Doctor--if you ARE a doctor--"

"I  don't  see  that I need to convince you!" he raged, as he stalked off. All the way to Ward D he was furious at her veiled derision. He was an
eminent  scientist, and it was outrageous that he should have to endure impudence from a probationer--a singularly vulgar probationer, a thin and
slangy  young  woman  apparently  from  the  West. He repeated his rebuke: "I don't see that I need to convince you." He was proud of himself for
having  been  lofty.  He  pictured himself telling Madeline about it, concluding, "I just said to her quietly, 'My dear young woman, I don't know
that you are the person to whom I have to explain my mission here,' I said, and she wilted."

But  her  image had not wilted, when he had found the intern who was to help him and had taken the spinal fluid. She was before him, provocative,
enduring.  He  had  to  see  her  again,  and convince her--"Take a better man than she is, better man than I've ever met, to get away with being
insulting to ME!" said the modest young scientist.

He  had  raced  back  to her room and they were staring at each other before it came to him that he had not worked out the crushing things he was
going  to  say. She had risen from her scrubbing. She had taken off her turban, and her hair was silky and honey-colored, her eyes were blue, her
face childish. There was nothing of the slavey in her. He could imagine her running down hillsides, shinning up a sack of straw.

"Oh,"  she  said  gravely. "I didn't mean to be rude then. I was just-- Scrubbing makes me bad-tempered. I thought you were awfully nice, and I'm
sorry I hurt your feelings, but you did seem so young for a doctor."

"I'm not. I'm a medic. I was showing off."

"So was I!"

He  felt  an  instant  and complete comradeship with her, a relation free from the fencing and posing of his struggle with Madeline. He knew that
this  girl  was  of  his  own  people. If she was vulgar, jocular, unreticent, she was also gallant, she was full of laughter at humbugs, she was
capable of a loyalty too casual and natural to seem heroic. His voice was lively, though his words were only:

"Pretty hard, this training for nursing, I guess."

"Not so awful, but it's just as romantic as being a hired girl--that's what we call 'em in Dakota."

"Come from Dakota?"

"I  come from the most enterprising town--three hundred and sixty-two inhabitants--in the entire state of North Dakota--Wheatsylvania. Are you in
the U. medic school?"

To  a passing nurse, the two youngsters would have seemed absorbed in hospital business. Martin stood at the door, she by her scrubbing pail. She
had reassumed her turban; its bagginess obscured her bright hair.

"Yes, I'm a Junior medic in Mohalis. But--I don't know. I'm not much of a medic. I like the lab side. I think I'll be a bacteriologist, and raise
Cain with some of the fool theories of immunology. And I don't think much of the bedside manner."

"I  glad  you don't. You get it here. You ought to hear some of the docs that are the sweetest old pussies with their patients--the way they bawl
out the nurses. But labs--they seem sort of real. I don't suppose you can bluff a bacteria--what is it?--bacterium?"

"No, they're-- What do they call you?"

"Me? Oh, it's an idiotic name--Leora Tozer."

"What's the matter with Leora? It's fine."

Sound  of  mating  birds, sound of spring blossoms dropping in the tranquil air, the bark of sleepy dogs at midnight; who is to set them down and
make  them  anything  but hackneyed? And as natural, as conventional, as youthfully gauche, as eternally beautiful and authentic as those ancient
sounds  was the talk of Martin and Leora in that passionate half-hour when each found in the other a part of his own self, always vaguely missed,
discovered  now with astonished joy. They rattled like hero and heroine of a sticky tale, like sweat-shop operatives, like bouncing rustics, like
prince  and  princess.  Their  words  were silly and inconsequential, heard one by one, yet taken together they were as wise and important as the
tides or the sounding wind.

He  told  her that he admired Max Gottlieb, that he had crossed her North Dakota on a train, and that he was an excellent hockey-player. She told
him  that she "adored" vaudeville, that her father, Andrew Jackson Tozer, was born in the East (by which she meant Illinois), and that she didn't
particularly  care  for  nursing. She had no especial personal ambition; she had come here because she liked adventure. She hinted, with debonair
regret,  that  she was not too popular with the superintendent of nurses; she meant to be good but somehow she was always dragged into rebellions
connected  with midnight fudge or elopements. There was nothing heroic in her story but from her placid way of telling it he had an impression of
gay courage.

He interrupted with an urgent, "When can you get away from the hospital for dinner? Tonight?"

"Why--"

"Please!"

"All right."

"When can I call for you?"

"Do you think I ought to-- Well, seven."

All  the  way back to Mohalis he alternately raged and rejoiced. He informed himself that he was a moron to make this long trip into Zenith twice
in  one  day;  he  remembered  that he was engaged to a girl called Madeline Fox; he worried the matter of unfaithfulness; he asserted that Leora
Tozer  was  merely  an  imitation  nurse  who  was as illiterate as a kitchen wench and as impertinent as a newsboy; he decided, several times he
decided, to telephone her and free himself from the engagement.

He was at the hospital at a quarter to seven.

He  had  to  wait for twenty minutes in a reception-room like that of an undertaker. He was in a panic. What was he doing here? She'd probably be
agonizingly  dull,  through  a  whole  long dinner. Would he even recognize her, in mufti? Then he leaped up. She was at the door. Her sulky blue
uniform  was  gone;  she was childishly slim and light in a princess frock that was a straight line from high collar and soft young breast to her
feet. It seemed natural to tuck her hand under his arm as they left the hospital. She moved beside him with a little dancing step, shyer now than
she had been in the dignity of her job but looking up at him with confidence.

"Glad I came?" he demanded.

She  thought it over. She had a trick of gravely thinking over obvious questions; and gravely (but with the gravity of a child, not the ponderous
gravity of a politician or an office-manager) she admitted, "Yes, I am glad. I was afraid you'd go and get sore at me because I was so fresh, and
I  wanted  to  apologize  and--I  liked your being so crazy about your bacteriology. I think I'm a little crazy, too. The interns here--they come
bothering  around a lot, but they're so sort of--so sort of SOGGY, with their new stethoscopes and their brand-new dignity. Oh--" Most gravely of
all: "Oh, gee, yes, I'm glad you came. . . . Am I an idiot to admit it?"

"You're a darling to admit it." He was a little dizzy with her. He pressed her hand with his arm.

"You won't think I let every medic and doctor pick me up, will you?"

"Leora! And you don't think I try and pick up every pretty girl I meet? I liked--I felt somehow we two could be chums. Can't we? Can't we?"

"I don't know. We'll see. Where are we going for dinner?"

"The Grand Hotel."

"We are not! It's terribly expensive. Unless you're awfully rich. You aren't, are you?"

"No, I'm not. Just enough money to get through medic school. But I want--"

"Let's go to the Bijou. It's a nice place, and it isn't expensive."

He  remembered how often Madeline Fox had hinted that it would be a tasty thing to go to the Grand, Zenith's most resplendent hotel, but that was
the  last  time  he  thought of Madeline that evening. He was absorbed in Leora. He found in her a casualness, a lack of prejudice, a directness,
surprising in the daughter of Andrew Jackson Tozer. She was feminine but undemanding; she was never Improving and rarely shocked; she was neither
flirtatious  nor cold. She was indeed the first girl to whom he had ever talked without self-consciousness. It is doubtful if Leora herself had a
chance to say anything, for he poured out his every confidence as a disciple of Gottlieb. To Madeline, Gottlieb was a wicked old man who made fun
of  the sanctities of Marriage and Easter lilies, to Clif, he was a bore, but Leora glowed as Martin banged the table and quoted his idol: "Up to
the present, even in the work of Ehrlich, most research has been largely a matter of trial and error, the empirical method, which is the opposite
of the scientific method, by which one seeks to establish a general law governing a group of phenomena so that he may predict what will happen."

He  intoned  it  reverently,  staring  across the table at her, almost glaring at her. He insisted, "Do you see where he leaves all these detail-
grubbing, machine-made researchers buzzing in the manure heap just as much as he does the commercial docs? Do you get him? Do you?"

"Yes, I think I do. Anyway, I get your enthusiasm for him. But please don't bully me so!"

"Was I bullying? I didn't mean to. Only, when I get to thinking about the way most of these damned profs don't even know what he's up to--"

Martin  was  off  again, and if Leora did not altogether understand the relation of the synthesis of antibodies to the work of Arrhenius, yet she
listened with comfortable pleasure in his zeal, with none of Madeline Fox's gently corrective admonitions.

She had to warn him that she must be at the hospital by ten.

"I've talked too much! Lord, I hope I haven't bored you," he blurted.

"I loved it."

"And I was so technical, and so noisy-- Oh, I AM a chump!"

"I like having you trust me. I'm not 'earnest,' and I haven't any brains whatever, but I do love it when my menfolks think I'm intelligent enough
to hear what they really think and-- Good night!"

They dined together twice in two weeks, and only twice in that time, though she telephoned to him, did Martin see his honest affianced, Madeline.

He  came  to know all of Leora's background. Her bed-ridden grand-aunt in Zenith, who was her excuse for coming so far to take hospital training.
The  hamlet  of  Wheatsylvania,  North  Dakota; one street of shanties with the red grain-elevators at the end. Her father, Andrew Jackson Tozer,
sometimes  known  as  Jackass  Tozer; owner of the bank, of the creamery, and an elevator, therefore the chief person in town; pious at Wednesday
evening  prayer-meeting, fussing over every penny he gave to Leora or her mother. Bert Tozer, her brother; squirrel teeth, a gold eye-glass chain
over  his ear, cashier and all the rest of the staff in the one-room bank owned by his father. The chicken salad and coffee suppers at the United
Brethren  Church;  German  Lutheran farmers singing ancient Teutonic hymns; the Hollanders, the Bohemians and Poles. And round about the village,
the  living  wheat,  arched above by tremendous clouds. He saw Leora, always an "odd child," doing obediently enough the flat household tasks but
keeping  snug  the  belief  that  some  day she would find a youngster with whom, in whatever danger or poverty, she would behold all the colored
world.

It  was  at  the  end  of  her hesitating effort to make him see her childhood that he cried, "Darling, you don't have to tell me about you. I've
always known you. I'm not going to let you go, no matter what. You're going to marry me--"

They said it with clasping hands, confessing eyes, in that blatant restaurant. Her first words were:

"I  want to call you 'Sandy.' Why do I? I don't know why. You're as unsandy as can be, but somehow 'Sandy' means you to me and--Oh, my dear, I do
like you!"

Martin went home engaged to two girls at once.



IV


He had promised to see Madeline the next morning.

By  any  canon  of respectable behavior he should have felt like a low dog; he assured himself that he must feel like a low dog; but he could not
bring  it  off. He thought of Madeline's pathetic enthusiasms: her "Provencal pleasaunce" and the limp-leather volumes of poetry which she patted
with fond finger-tips; of the tie she had bought for him, and her pride in his hair when he brushed it like the patent-leather heroes in magazine
illustrations.  He  mourned  that  he  had  sinned  against  loyalty.  But  his agitation broke against the solidity of his union with Leora. Her
companionship  released his soul. Even when, as advocate for Madeline, he pleaded that Leora was a trivial young woman who probably chewed gum in
private and certainly was careless about her nails in public, her commonness was dear to the commonness that was in himself, valid as ambition or
reverence, an earthy base to her gaiety as it was to his nervous scientific curiosity.

He  was  absent-minded in the laboratory, that fatal next day. Gottlieb had twice to ask him whether he had prepared the new batch of medium, and
Gottlieb  was  an autocrat, sterner with his favorites than with the ruck of students. He snarled, "Arrowsmith, you are a moon-calf! My God, am I
to  spend  my  life  with  Dummkopfe? I cannot be always alone, Martin! Are you going to fail me? Two, three days now you haf not been keen about
work."

Martin  went  off  mumbling,  "I  love  that  man!"  In  his  tangled  mood he catalogued Madeline's pretenses, her nagging, her selfishness, her
fundamental  ignorance.  He  worked  himself  up  to  a  state of virtue in which it was agreeably clear to him that he must throw Madeline over,
entirely  as  a  rebuke. He went to her in the evening prepared to blaze out at her first complaining, to forgive her finally, but to break their
engagement and make life resolutely simple again.

She did not complain.

She  ran  to  him.  "Dear,  you're  so  tired--your eyes look tired. Have you been working frightfully hard? I've been so sorry you couldn't come
'round, this week. Dear, you mustn't kill yourself. Think of all the years you have ahead to do splendid things in. No, don't talk. I want you to
rest. Mother's gone to the movies. Sit here. See, I'll make you so comfy with these pillows. Just lean back--go to sleep if you want to--and I'll
read you 'The Crock of Gold.' You'll love it."

He was determined that he would not love it and, as he probably had no sense of humor whatever, it is doubtful whether he appreciated it, but its
differentness  aroused him. Though Madeline's voice was shrill and cornfieldish after Leora's lazy softness, she read so eagerly that he was sick
ashamed  of his intention to hurt her. He saw that it was she, with her pretenses, who was the child, and the detached and fearless Leora who was
mature, mistress of a real world. The reproofs with which he had planned to crush her vanished.

Suddenly she was beside him, begging, "I've been so lonely for you, all week!"

So  he  was  a  traitor  to  both  women,  it was Leora who had intolerably roused him; it was really Leora whom he was caressing now; but it was
Madeline  who  took  his hunger to herself, and when she whimpered, "I'm so glad you're glad to be here," he could say nothing. He wanted to talk
about Leora, to shout about Leora, to exult in her, his woman. He dragged out a few sound but unimpassioned flatteries; he observed that Madeline
was a handsome young woman and a sound English scholar; and while she gaped with disappointment at his lukewarmness, he got himself away, at ten.
He had finally succeeded very well indeed in feeling like a low dog.

He hastened to Clif Clawson.

He  had  told Clif nothing about Leora. He resented Clif's probable scoffing. He thought well of himself for the calmness with which he came into
their  room.  Clif  was sitting on the small of his back, shoeless feet upon the study table, reading a Sherlock Holmes story which rested on the
powerful volume of Osler's Medicine which he considered himself to be reading.

"Clif! Want a drink. Tired. Let's sneak down to Barney's and see if we can rustle one."

"Thou  speakest  as  one  having  tongues  and  who  putteth  the  speed behind the ole rhombencephalon comprising the cerebellum and the medulla
oblongata."

"Oh, cut out the Cuteness! I'm in a bad temper."

"Ah,  the  laddie  has been having a scrap with his chaste lil Madeline! Was she horrid to ickly Martykins? All right. I'll quit. Come on. Yoicks
for the drink."

He  told  three new stories about Professor Robertshaw, all of them scurrilous and most of them untrue, on their way, and he almost coaxed Martin
into  cheerfulness.  "Barney's"  was  a poolroom, a tobacco shop and, since Mohalis was dry by local option, an admirable blind-pig. Clif and the
hairy-handed Barney greeted each other in a high and worthy manner:

"The  benisons  of eventide to you, Barney. May your circulation proceed unchecked and particularly the dorsal carpal branch of the ulnar artery,
in which connection, comrade, Prof. Dr. Col. Egbert Arrowsmith and I would fain trifle with another bottle of that renowned strawberry pop."

"Gosh,  Clif,  you  cer'nly got a swell line of jaw-music. If I ever need a' arm amputated when you get to be a doc, I'll come around and let you
talk it off. Strawberry pop, gents?"

The  front  room  of Barney's was an impressionistic painting in which a pool-table, piles of cigarettes, chocolate bars, playing cards, and pink
sporting  papers were jumbled in chaos. The back room was simpler: cases of sweet and thinly flavored soda, a large ice-box, and two small tables
with  broken  chairs.  Barney  poured,  from  a bottle plainly marked Ginger Ale, two glasses of powerful and appalling raw whiskey, and Clif and
Martin  took  them to the table in the corner. The effect was swift. Martin's confused sorrows turned to optimism. He told Clif that he was going
to  write a book exposing idealism, but what he meant was that he was going to do something clever about his dual engagement. He had it! He would
invite  Leora  and Madeline to lunch together, tell them the truth, and see which of them loved him. He whooped, and had another whiskey; he told
Clif  that  he was a fine fellow, and Barney that he was a public benefactor, and unsteadily he retired to the telephone, which was shut off from
public hearing in a closet.

At the Zenith General Hospital he got the night superintendent, and the night Superintendent was a man frosty and suspicious. "This is no time to
be calling up a probationer! Half-past eleven! Who are you, anyway?"

Martin  checked  the  "I'll damn' soon tell you who I am!" which was his natural reaction, and explained that he was speaking for Leora's invalid
grand-aunt,  that  the  poor  old  lady  was  very  low,  and  if  the  night superintendent cared to take upon himself the murder of a blameless
gentlewoman--

When  Leora came to the telephone he said quickly, and soberly now, feeling as though he had come from the menace of thronging strangers into the
security of her presence:

"Leora? Sandy. Meet me Grand lobby tomorrow, twelve-thirty. Must! Important! Fix 't somehow--your aunt's sick."

"All right, dear. G' night," was all she said.

It took him long minutes to get an answer from Madeline's flat, then Mrs. Fox's voice sounded, sleepily, quaveringly:

"Yes, yes?"

"'S Martin."

"Who is it? Who is it? What is it? Are you calling the Fox apartment?"

"Yes, yes! Mrs. Fox, it's Martin Arrowsmith speaking."

"Oh,  oh, my dear! The 'phone woke me out of a sound sleep, and I couldn't make out what you were saying. I was so frightened. I thought maybe it
was a telegram or something. I thought perhaps something had happened to Maddy's brother. What is it, dear? Oh, I do hope nothing's happened!"

Her  confidence  in  him,  the  affection  of  this uprooted old woman bewildered in a strange land, overcame him; he lost all his whisky-colored
feeling  that  he  was  a  nimble  fellow,  and  in  a melancholy way, with all the weight of life again upon him, he sighed that no, nothing had
happened, but he'd forgotten to tell Madeline something--so shor--so sorry call so late--could he speak Mad just minute--

Then Madeline was bubbling, "Why, Marty dear, what is it? I do hope nothing has happened! Why, dear, you just left here--"

"Listen, d-dear. Forgot to tell you. There's a--there's a great friend of mine in Zenith that I want you to meet--"

"Who is he?"

"You'll  see tomorrow. Listen, I want you come in and meet--come meet um at lunch. Going," with ponderous jocularity, "going to blow you all to a
swell feed at the Grand--"

"Oh, how nice!"

"--so I want you to meet me at the eleven-forty interurban, at College Square. Can you?"

Vaguely,  "Oh,  I'd  love  to but--I have an eleven o'clock, and I don't like to cut it, and I promised May Harmon to go shopping with her--she's
looking  for  some  kind  of shoes that you can wear with her pink crepe de chine but that you can walk in--and we sort of thought maybe we might
lunch  at  Ye  Kollege  Karavanserai--and  I'd  half planned to go to the movies with her or somebody, Mother says that new Alaska film is simply
dandy,  she saw it tonight, and I thought I might go see it before they take it off, though Heaven knows I ought to come right home and study and
not go anywhere at all--"

"Now LISTEN! It's important. Don't you trust me? Will you come or not?"

"Why, of course I trust you, dear. All right, I'll try to be there. The eleven-forty?"

"Yes."

"At College Square? Or at Bluthman's Book Shop?"

"AT COLLEGE SQUARE!"

Her gentle "I trust you" and her wambling "I'll try to" were warring in his ears as he plunged out of the suffocating cell and returned to Clif.

"What's  the  grief?"  Clif  wondered.  "Wife  passed  away?  Or  did the Giants win in the ninth? Barney, our wandering-boy-tonight looks like a
necropsy. Slip him another strawberry pop, quick. Say, Doctor, I think you better call a physician."

"Oh, shut up," was all Martin had to say, and that without conviction. Before telephoning he had been full of little brightnesses; he had praised
Clif's  pool-playing  and called Barney "old Cimex lectularius"; but now, while the affectionate Clif worked on him, he sat brooding save when he
grumbled  (with a return of self-satisfaction), "If you knew all the troubles I have--all the doggone mess a fellow can get into--YOU'D feel down
in the mouth!"

Clif  was  alarmed.  "Look  here,  old  socks. If you've gotten in debt, I'll raise the cash, somehow. If it's-- Been going a little too far with
Madeline?"

"You make me sick! You've got a dirty mind. I'm not worthy to touch Madeline's hand. I regard her with nothing but respect."

"The  hell  you  do!  But  never  mind,  if you say so. Gosh, wish there was SOMETHING I could do for you. Oh! Have 'nother shot! Barney! Come a-
runnin'!"

By  several  drinks  Martin was warmed into a hazy carelessness, and Clif solicitously dragged him home after he had desired to fight three large
academic sophomores. But in the morning he awoke with a crackling skull and a realization that he was going to face Leora and Madeline at lunch.



V


His  half-hour  journey  with  Madeline into Zenith seemed a visible and oppressing thing, like a tornado cloud. He had not merely to get through
each minute as it came; the whole grim thirty minutes were present at the same time. While he was practicing the tactful observation he was going
to  present  two  minutes from now, he could still hear the clumsy thing he had said two minutes before. He fought to keep her attention from the
"great  friend of his" whom they were to meet. With fatuous beaming he described a night at Barney's; without any success whatever he tried to be
funny;  and when Madeline lectured him on the evils of liquor and the evils of association with immoral persons, he was for once relieved. But he
could not sidetrack her.

"Who  is  this  man we're going to see? What are you so mysterious about? Oh, Martin, is it a joke? Aren't we going to meet anybody? Did you just
want to run away from Mama for a while and we have a bat at the Grand together? Oh, what fun! I've always wanted to lunch at the Grand. Of course
I do think it's too sort of rococo, but still, it is impressive, and-- Did I guess it, darling?"

"No, there's someone-- Oh, we're going to meet somebody, all right!"

"Then why don't you tell me who he is? Honestly, Mart, you make me impatient."

"Well, I'll tell you. It isn't a Him; it's a Her."

"Oh!"

"It's-- You know my work takes me to the hospitals, and some of the nurses at Zenith General have been awfully helpful." He was panting. His eyes
ached. Since the torture of the coming lunch was inevitable, he wondered why he should go on trying to resist his punishment. "Especially there's
one nurse there who's a wonder. She's learned so much about the care of the sick, and she puts me onto a lot of good stunts, and she seems like a
nice girl--Miss Tozer, her name is--I think her first name is Lee or something like that--and she's so--her father is one of the big men in North
Dakota--awfully  rich--big  banker--I guess she just took up nursing to do her share in the world's work." He had achieved Madeline's own tone of
poetic  uplift.  "I  thought  you  two might like to know each other. You remember you were saying how few girls there are in Mohalis that really
appreciate--appreciate ideals."

"Ye-es."  Madeline  gazed  at  something far away and, whatever it was, she did not like it. "I shall be ver' pleased to meet her, of course. ANY
friend  of  yours-- Oh, Mart! I do hope you don't flirt; I hope you don't get too friendly with all these nurses. I don't know anything about it,
of course, but I keep hearing how some of these nurses are regular man-hunters."

"Well, let me tell you right now, Leora isn't!"

"No,  I'm sure, but-- Oh, Martykins, you won't be silly and let these nurses just amuse themselves with you? I mean, for your own sake. They have
such  an  advantage.  Poor  Madeline,  she  wouldn't  be  allowed  to  go  hanging  around  men's rooms learning--things, and you think you're so
psychological, Mart, but honestly, any smart woman can twist you around her finger."

"Well, I guess I can take care of myself!"

"Oh,  I  mean--I  don't  mean--  But I do hope this Tozer person-- I'm sure I shall like her, if you do, but-- I am your own true love, aren't I,
always!"

She, the proper, ignored the passengers as she clasped his hand. She sounded so frightened that his anger at her reflections on Leora turned into
misery.  Incidentally,  her  thumb  was  gouging painfully into the back of his hand. He tried to look tender as he protested, "Sure--sure--gosh,
honest, Mad, look out. The old duffer across the aisle is staring at us."

For whatever infidelities he might ever commit he was adequately punished before they had reached the Grand Hotel.

The Grand was, in 1907, the best hotel in Zenith. It was compared by traveling salesmen to the Parker House, the Palmer House, the West Hotel. It
has  been  humbled  since  by  the  supercilious  modesty  of the vast Hotel Thornleigh; dirty now is its tessellated floor and all the wild gilt
tarnished,  and in its ponderous leather chairs are torn seams and stogie ashes and horse-dealers. But in its day it was the proudest inn between
Chicago and Pittsburgh; an oriental palace, the entrance a score of brick Moorish arches, the lobby towering from a black and white marble floor,
up past gilt iron balconies, to the green, pink, pearl, and amber skylight seven stories above.

They  found  Leora  in  the  lobby, tiny on an enormous couch built round a pillar. She stared at Madeline, quiet, waiting. Martin perceived that
Leora  was  unusually  sloppy--his  own  word.  It  did  not  matter to him how clumsily her honey-colored hair was tucked under her black hat, a
characterless little mushroom of a hat, but he did see and resent the contrast between her shirtwaist, with the third button missing, her checked
skirt,  her  unfortunate  bright  brown bolero jacket, and Madeline's sleekness of blue serge. The resentment was not toward Leora. Scanning them
together  (not  haughtily,  as the choosing and lofty male, but anxiously) he was more irritated than ever by Madeline. That she should be better
dressed was an affront. His affection flew to guard Leora, to wrap and protect her.

And all the while he was bumbling:

"--thought  you  two girls ought to know each other--Miss Fox, want t' make you 'quainted with Miss Tozer--little celebration--lucky dog have two
Queens of Sheba--"

And to himself, "Oh, hell!"

While they murmured nothing in particular to each other he herded them into the famous dining-room of the Grand. It was full of gilt chandeliers,
red plush chairs, heavy silverware, and aged Negro retainers with gold and green waistcoats. Round the walls ran select views of Pompeii, Venice,
Lake Como, and Versailles.

"Swell room!" chirped Leora.

Madeline  had  looked as though she intended to say the same thing in longer words, but she considered the frescoes all over again and explained,
"Well, it's very large--"

He was ordering, with agony. He had appropriated four dollars for the orgy, strictly including the tip, and his standard of good food was that he
must  spend  every  cent of the four dollars. While he wondered what "Puree St. Germain" could be, and the waiter hideously stood watching behind
his shoulder, Madeline fell to. She chanted with horrifying politeness:

"Mr. Arrowsmith tells me you are a nurse, Miss--Tozer."

"Yes, sort of."

"Do you find it interesting?"

"Well--yes--yes, I think it's interesting."

"I  suppose  it  must  be  wonderful to relieve suffering. Of course my work--I'm taking my Doctor of Philosophy degree in English--" She made it
sound  as  though she were taking her earldom--"it's rather dry and detached. I have to master the growth of the language and so on and so forth.
With your practical training, I suppose you'd find that rather stupid."

"Yes, it must be--no, it must be very interesting."

"Do you come from Zenith, Miss--Tozer?"

"No, I come from-- Just a little town. Well, hardly a town. . . . North Dakota."

"Oh! North Dakota!"

"Yes. . . . Way West."

"Oh, yes. . . . Are you staying East for some time?" It was precisely what a much-resented New York cousin had once said to Madeline.

"Well, I don't-- Yes, I guess I may be here quite some time."

"Do you, uh, do you find you like it here?"

"Oh, yes, it's pretty nice. These big cities-- So much to see."

"'Big'?  Well,  I  suppose  it  all  depends on the point of view, DOESN'T it? I always think of New York as big but-- Of course--Do you find the
contrast to North Dakota interesting?"

"Well, of course it's different."

"Tell  me what North Dakota's like. I've always wondered about these Western states." It was Madeline's second plagiarism of her cousin. "What is
the general impression it makes on you?"

"I don't think I know just how you mean."

"I mean what is the general effect? The--IMPRESSION."

"Well, it's got lots of wheat and lots of Swedes."

"But I mean-- I suppose you're all terribly virile and energetic, compared with us Easterners."

"I don't-- Well, yes, maybe."

"Have you met lots of people in Zenith?"

"Not so AWFULLY many."

"Oh,  have  you  met Dr. Birchall, that operates in your hospital? He's such a nice man, and not just a good surgeon but frightfully talented. He
sings won-derfully, and he comes from the most frightfully nice family."

"No, I don't think I've met him yet," Leora bleated.

"Oh,  you  must.  And  he  plays  the slickest--the most gorgeous game of tennis. He always goes to all these millionaire parties on Royal Ridge.
Frightfully smart."

Martin now first interrupted. "Smart? Him? He hasn't got any brains whatever."

"My  dear  child, I didn't mean 'smart' in that sense!" He sat alone and helpless while she again turned on Leora and ever more brightly inquired
whether  Leora  knew  this  son  of a corporation lawyer and that famous debutante, this hatshop and that club. She spoke familiarly of what were
known  as  the  Leaders  of  Zenith  Society,  the personages who appeared daily in the society columns of the Advocate-Times, the Cowxes and Van
Antrims and Dodsworths. Martin was astonished by the familiarity; he remembered that she had once gone to a charity ball in Zenith but he had not
known that she was so intimate with the peerage. Certainly Leora had appallingly never heard of these great ones, nor even attended the concerts,
the lectures, the recitals at which Madeline apparently spent all her glittering evenings.

Madeline  shrugged  a  little,  then, "Well-- Of course with the fascinating doctors and everybody that you meet in the hospital, I suppose you'd
find  lectures frightfully tame. Well--" She dismissed Leora and looked patronizingly at Martin. "Are you planning some more work on the what-is-
it with rabbits?"

He  was  grim. He could do it now, if he got it over quickly. "Madeline! Brought you two together because-- Don't know whether you cotton to each
other  or  not, but I wish you could, because I've-- I'm not making any excuses for myself. I couldn't help it. I'm engaged to both of you, and I
want to know--"

Madeline  had  sprung up. She had never looked quite so proud and fine. She stared at them, and walked away, wordless. She came back, she touched
Leora's shoulder, and quietly kissed her. "Dear, I'm sorry for you. You've got a job! You poor baby!" She strode away, her shoulders straight.

Hunched, frightened, Martin could not look at Leora.

He felt her hand on his. He looked up. She was smiling, easy, a little mocking. "Sandy, I warn you that I'm never going to give you up. I suppose
you're as bad as She says; I suppose I'm foolish--I'm a hussy. But you're mine! I warn you it isn't a bit of use your getting engaged to somebody
else again. I'd tear her eyes out! Now don't think so well of yourself! I guess you're pretty selfish. But I don't care. You're mine!"

He said brokenly many things beautiful in their commonness.

She pondered, "I do feel we're nearer together than you and Her. Perhaps you like me better because you can bully me--because I tag after you and
She never would. And I know your work is more important to you than I am, maybe more important than you are. But I am stupid and ordinary and She
isn't. I simply admire you frightfully (Heaven knows why, but I do), while She has sense enough to make you admire Her and tag after Her."

"No!  I  swear it isn't because I can bully you, Leora--I swear it isn't--I don't think it is. Dearest, don't DON'T think she's brighter than you
are. She's glib but-- Oh, let's stop talking! I've found you! My life's begun!"




Chapter 7



The difference between Martin's relations to Madeline and to Leora was the difference between a rousing duel and a serene comradeship. From their
first  evening,  Leora  and  he  depended  on  each other's loyalty and liking, and certain things in his existence were settled forever. Yet his
absorption  in  her  was  not  stagnant.  He was always making discoveries about the observations of life which she kept incubating in her secret
little head while she made smoke rings with her cigarettes and smiled silently. He longed for the girl Leora; she stirred him, and with gay frank
passion  she  answered him; but to another, sexless Leora he talked more honestly than to Gottlieb or his own worried self, while with her boyish
nod or an occasional word she encouraged him to confidence in his evolving ambition and disdains.



II


Digamma  Pi  fraternity  was  giving  a dance. It was understood among the anxiously whispering medics that so cosmopolitan was the University of
Winnemac becoming that they were expected to wear the symbols of respectability known as "dress-suits." On the solitary and nervous occasion when
Martin  had worn evening clothes he had rented them from the Varsity Pantorium, but he must own them, now that he was going to introduce Leora to
the  world  as  his pride and flowering. Like two little old people, absorbed in each other and diffidently exploring new, unwelcoming streets of
the  city  where their alienated children live, Martin and Leora edged into the garnished magnificence of Benson, Hanley and Koch's, the loftiest
department  store  in  Zenith. She was intimidated by the luminous cases of mahogany and plate glass, by the opera hats and lustrous mufflers and
creamy  riding  breeches.  When  he had tried on a dinner suit and come out for her approval, his long brown tie and soft-collared shirt somewhat
rustic behind the low evening waistcoat, and when the clerk had gone to fetch collars, she wailed:

"Darn  it, Sandy, you're too grand for me. I just simply can't get myself to fuss over my clothes, and here you're going to go and look so spiffy
I won't have a chance with you."

He almost kissed her.

The clerk, returning, warbled, "I think, Modom, you'll find that your husband will look vurry nice indeed in these wing collars."

Then, while the clerk sought ties, he did kiss her, and she sighed:

"Oh,  gee, you're one of these people that get ahead. I never thought I'd have to live up to a man with a dress-suit and a come-to-Heaven collar.
Oh, well, I'll tag!"



III


For  the  Digamma  Ball, the University Armory was extremely decorated. The brick walls were dizzy with bunting, spotty with paper chrysanthemums
and plaster skulls and wooden scalpels ten feet long.

In  six  years  at  Mohalis, Martin had gone to less than a score of dances, though the refined titillations of communal embracing were the chief
delight  of  the  co-educational  university.  When  he  arrived  at  the Armory, with Leora timorously brave in a blue crepe de chine made in no
recognized  style, he did not care whether he had a single two-step, though he did achingly desire to have the men crowd in and ask Leora, admire
her  and  make  her  welcome.  Yet  he was too proud to introduce her about, lest he seem to be begging his friends to dance with her. They stood
alone,  under  the  balcony,  disconsolately  facing  the  vastness  of  the  floor, while beyond them flashed the current of dancers, beautiful,
formidable,  desirable.  Leora and he had assured each other that, for a student affair, dinner jacket and black waistcoat would be the thing, as
stated in the Benson, Hanley and Koch Chart of Correct Gents' Wearing Apparel, but he grew miserable at the sight of voluptuous white waistcoats,
and  when that embryo famous surgeon, Angus Duer, came by, disdainful as a greyhound and pushing on white gloves (which are the whitest, the most
superciliously white objects on earth), then Martin felt himself a hobbledehoy.

"Come on, WE'LL dance," he said, as though it were a defiance to all Angus Duers.

He very much wanted to go home.

He  did  not  enjoy  the  dance,  though she waltzed easily and himself not too badly. He did not even enjoy having her in his arms. He could not
believe  that she was in his arms. As they revolved he saw Duer join a brilliance of pretty girls and distinguished-looking women about the great
Dr.  Silva,  dean  of  the medical school. Angus seemed appallingly at home, and he waltzed off with the prettiest girl, sliding, swinging, deft.
Martin tried to hate him as a fool, but he remembered that yesterday Angus had been elected to the honorary society of Sigma Xi.

Leora and he crept back to the exact spot beneath the balcony where they had stood before, to their den, their one safe refuge. While he tried to
be nonchalant and talk up to his new clothes, he was cursing the men he saw go by laughing with girls, ignoring his Leora.

"Not many here yet," he fussed. "Pretty soon they'll all be coming, and then you'll have lots of dances."

"Oh, I don't mind."

("God, won't somebody come and ask the poor kid?")

He  fretted  over his lack of popularity among the dancing-men of the medical school. He wished Clif Clawson were present--Clif liked any sort of
assembly,  but  he  could  not  afford  dress-clothes.  Then,  rejoicing  as at sight of the best-beloved, he saw Irving Watters, that paragon of
professional  normality,  wandering  toward them, but Watters passed by, merely nodding. Thrice Martin hoped and desponded, and now all his pride
was gone. If Leora could be happy--

"I  wouldn't  care a hoot if she fell for the gabbiest fusser in the whole U., and gave me the go-by all evening. Anything to let her have a good
time! If I could coax Duer over-- No, that's one thing I couldn't stand: crawling to that dirty snob-- I will!"

Up ambled Fatty Pfaff, just arrived. Martin pounced on him lovingly. "H'lo, old Fat! You a stag tonight? Meet my friend Miss Tozer."

Fatty's  bulbous  eyes  showed  approval  of  Leora's  cheeks  and  amber hair. He heaved, "Pleasedmeetch--dance starting--have the honor?" in so
flattering a manner that Martin could have kissed him.

That  he  himself stood alone through the dance did not occur to him. He leaned against a pillar and gloated. He felt gorgeously unselfish. . . .
That various girl wallflowers were sitting near him, waiting to be asked, did not occur to him either.

He  saw  Fatty  introduce Leora to a decorative pair of Digams, one of whom begged her for the next. Thereafter she had more invitations than she
could  take.  Martin's excitement cooled. It seemed to him that she clung too closely to her partners, that she followed their steps too eagerly.
After  the  fifth  dance he was agitated. "Course! SHE'S enjoying herself! Hasn't got time to notice that I just stand here--yes, by thunder, and
hold her scarf! Sure! Fine for her. Fact I might like a little dancing myself-- And the way she grins and gawps at that fool Brindle Morgan, the-
-the--the  damnedest--  Oh, you and I are going to have a talk, young woman! And those hounds trying to pinch her off me--the one thing I've ever
loved!  Just  because  they dance better than I can, and spiel a lot of foolishness-- And that damn' orchestra playing that damn' peppery music--
And she falling for all their damn' cheap compliments and-- You and I are going to have one lovely little understanding!"

When she next returned to him, besieged by three capering medics, he muttered to her, "Oh, it doesn't MATTER about ME!"

"Would  you  like this one? COURSE you shall have it!" She turned to him fully; she had none of Madeline's sense of having to act for the benefit
of  observers.  Through  a  strained  eternity  of  waiting,  while  he  glowered, she babbled of the floor, the size of the room, and her "dandy
partners." At the sound of the music he held out his arms.

"No,"  she  said.  "I  want to talk to you." She led him to a corner and hurled at him, "Sandy, this is the last time I'm going to stand for your
looking  jealous. Oh, I know! See here! If we're going to stick together--and we are!--I'm going to dance with just as many men as I want to, and
I'm  going to be just as foolish with 'em as I want to. Dinners and those things--I suppose I'll always go on being a clam. Nothing to say. But I
love  dancing, and I'm going to do exactly what I want to, and if you had any sense whatever, you'd know I don't care a hang for anybody but you.
Yours!  Absolute.  No matter what fool things you do--and they'll probably be a plenty. So when you go and get jealous on me again, you sneak off
and get rid of it. Aren't you ashamed of yourself!"

"I wasn't jealous-- Yes, I was. Oh, I can't help it! I love you so much. I'd be one fine lover, now wouldn't I, if I never got jealous!"

"All right. Only you've got to keep it under cover. Now we'll finish the dance."

He was her slave.



IV


It  was  regarded  as  immoral,  at  the  University  of Winnemac, to dance after midnight, and at that hour the guests crowded into the Imperial
Cafeteria. Ordinarily it closed at eight, but tonight it kept open till one, and developed a spirit of almost lascivious mirth. Fatty Pfaff did a
jig,  another  humorous  student,  with  a  napkin  over  his  arm,  pretended to be a waiter, and a girl (but she was much disapproved) smoked a
cigarette.

At the door Clif Clawson was waiting for Martin and Leora. He was in his familiar shiny gray suit, with a blue flannel shirt.

Clif  assumed  that he was the authority to whom all of Martin's friends must be brought for judgment. He had not met Leora. Martin had confessed
his  double  engagement;  he had explained that Leora was unquestionably the most gracious young woman on earth; but as he had previously used up
all  of  his  laudatory adjectives and all of Clif's patience on the subject of Madeline, Clif failed to listen, and prepared to dislike Leora as
another siren of morality.

He  eyed  her  now  with  patronizing enmity. He croaked at Martin behind her back, "Good-looking kid, I will say that for her--what's wrong with
her?" When they had brought their own sandwiches and coffee and mosaic cake from the long counter, Clif rasped:

"Well,  it's  grand  of  a  couple  of dress-suit swells like you to assassinate with me 'mid the midmosts of sartorials and Sassiety. Gosh, it's
fierce  I had to miss the select pleasures of an evening with Anxious Duer and associated highboys, and merely play a low game of poker--in which
Father  deftly  removed  the sum of six simolea, point ten, from the fore-gathered bums and yahoos. Well, Leory, I suppose you and Martykins here
have now ratiocinated all these questions of polo and, uh, Monte Carlo and so on."

She had an immense power of accepting people as they were. While Clif waited, leering, she placidly investigated the inside of a chicken sandwich
and assented, "Um-huh."

"Good boy! I thought you were going to pull that 'If you are a roughneck, I don't see why you think you've got to boast about it' stuff that Mart
springs on me!"

Clif  turned  into a jovial and (for him) unusually quiet companion. . . . Ex-farmhand, ex-book-agent, ex-mechanic, he had so little money yet so
scratching  a  desire to be resplendent that he took refuge in pride in poverty, pride in being offensive. Now, when Leora seemed to look through
his  boasting,  he  liked  her  as quickly as had Martin, and they buzzed with gaiety. Martin was warmed to benevolence toward mankind, including
Angus Duer, who was at the end of the room at a table with Dean Silva and his silvery women. Without plan, Martin sprang up, raced down the room.
Holding out his hand he clamored:

"Angus, old man, want to congratulate you on getting Sigma Xi. That's fine."

Duer  regarded the outstretched hand as though it was an instrument which he had seen before but whose use he could not quite remember. He picked
it up and shook it tentatively. He did not turn his back; he was worse than rude--he looked patient.

"Well, good luck," said Martin, chilled and shaky.

"Very good of you. Thanks."

Martin  returned to Leora and Clif, to tell them the incident as a cosmic tragedy. They agreed that Angus Duer was to be shot. In the midst of it
Duer came past, trailing after Dean Silva's party, and nodded to Martin, who glared back, feeling noble and mature.

At  parting, Clif held Leora's hand and urged, "Honey, I think a lot of Mart, and one time I was afraid the old kid was going to get tied up to--
to  parties  that would turn him into a hand-shaker. I'm a hand-shaker myself. I know less about medicine than Prof Robertshaw. But this boob has
some  conscience to him, and I'm so darn' glad he's playing around with a girl that's real folks and--Oh, listen at me fallin' all over my clumsy
feet! But I just mean I hope you won't mind Uncle Clif saying he does by golly like you a lot!"

It was almost four when Martin returned from taking Leora home and sagged into bed. He could not sleep. The aloofness of Angus Duer racked him as
an  insult  to  himself,  as  somehow  an  implied insult to Leora, but his boyish rage had passed into a bleaker worry. Didn't Duer, for all his
snobbishness  and  shallowness,  have something that he himself lacked? Didn't Clif, with his puppy-dog humor, his speech of a vaudeville farmer,
his  suspicion  of  fine  manners as posing, take life too easily? Didn't Duer know how to control and drive his hard little mind? Wasn't there a
technique of manners as there was of experimentation. . . . Gottlieb's fluent bench-technique versus the clumsy and podgy hands of Ira Hinkley. .
. . Or was all this inquiry a treachery, a yielding to Duer's own affected standard?

He  was so tired that behind his closed eyelids were flashes of fire. His whirling mind flew over every sentence he had said or heard that night,
till round his twisting body there was fevered shouting.



V


As  he  grumped  across the medical campus next day, he came unexpectedly upon Angus and he was smitten with the guiltiness and embarrassment one
has toward a person who has borrowed money and probably will not return it. Mechanically he began to blurt "Hello," but he checked it in a croak,
scowled, and stumbled on.

"Oh,  Mart,"  Angus  called.  He  was  dismayingly even. "Remember speaking to me last evening? It struck me when I was going out that you looked
huffy.  I was wondering if you thought I'd been rude. I'm sorry if you did. Fact is, I had a rotten headache. Look. I've got four tickets for 'As
It  Listeth,'  in Zenith, next Friday evening--original New York cast! Like to see it? And I noticed you were with a peach, at the dance. Suppose
she might like to go along with us, she and some friend of hers?"

"Why--gosh--I'll 'phone her--darn' nice of you to ask us--"

It  was not till melancholy dusk, when Leora had accepted and promised to bring with her a probationer-nurse named Nelly Byers, that Martin began
to brood:

"Wonder if he did have a headache last night?

"Wonder if somebody GAVE him the tickets?

"Why didn't he ask Dad Silva's daughter to go with us? Does he think Leora is some tart I've picked up?

"Sure, he never really quarrels with anybody--wants to keep us all friendly, so we'll send him surgical patients some day when we're hick G. P.'s
and he's a Great and Only.

"Why did I crawl down so meekly?

"I  don't care! If Leora enjoys it-- Me personally, I don't care two hoots for all this trotting around-- Though of course it isn't so bad to see
pretty women in fine clothes, and be dressed as good as anybody-- Oh, I don't KNOW!"



VI


In  the  slightly  Midwestern  city of Zenith, the appearance of a play "with the original New York cast" was an event. (What Play it was did not
much  matter.)  The  Dodsworth  Theatre  was  splendid with the aristocracy from the big houses on Royal Ridge. Leora and Nelly Byers admired the
bloods--graduates  of  Yale  and Harvard and Princeton, lawyers and bankers, motor-manufacturers and inheritors of real estate, virtuosi of golf,
familiars  of New York--who with their shrill and glistening women occupied the front rows. Miss Byers pointed out the Dodsworths, who were often
mentioned in Town Topics.

Leora  and  Miss Byers bounced with admiration of the hero when he refused the governorship; Martin worried because the heroine was prettier than
Leora;  and  Angus  Duer (who gave an appearance of knowing all about plays without having seen more than half a dozen in his life) admitted that
the set depicting "Jack Vanduzen's Camp in the Adirondacks: Sunset, the Next Day" was really very nice.

Martin was in a mood of determined hospitality. He was going to give them supper and that was all there was to it. Miss Byers explained that they
had  to be in the hospital by a quarter after eleven, but Leora said lazily, "Oh, I don't care. I'll slip in through a window. If you're there in
the  morning, the Old Cat can't prove you got in late." Shaking her head at this lying wickedness, Miss Byers fled to a trolley car, while Leora,
Angus,  and  Martin strolled to Epstein's Alt Nuremberg Cafe for beer and Swiss cheese sandwiches flavored by the sight of German drinking mottos
and papier-mache armor.

Angus  was studying Leora, looking from her to Martin, watching their glances of affection. That a keen young man should make a comrade of a girl
who  could  not  bring  him  social advancement, that such a thing as the boy and girl passion between Martin and Leora could exist, was probably
inconceivable  to  him.  He decided that she was conveniently frail. He gave Martin a refined version of a leer, and set himself to acquiring her
for his own uses.

"I hope you enjoyed the play," he condescended to her.

"Oh, yes--"

"Jove,  I  envy  you  two.  Of  course  I understand why girls fall for Martin here, with his romantic eyes, but a grind like me, I have to go on
working without a single person to give me sympathy. Oh, well, I deserve it for being shy of women."

With unexpected defiance from Leora: "When anybody says that, it means they're not shy, and they despise women."

"Despise them? Why, child, honestly, I long to be a Don Juan. But I don't know how. Won't you give me a lesson?" Angus's aridly correct voice had
become  lulling;  he  concentrated  on  Leora as he would have concentrated on dissecting a guinea pig. She smiled at Martin now and then to say,
"Don't  be  jealous, idiot. I'm magnificently uninterested in this conceited hypnotist." But she was flustered by Angus's sleek assurance, by his
homage to her eyes and wit and reticence.

Martin twitched with jealousy. He blurted that they must be going--Leora really had to be back-- The trolleys ran infrequently after midnight and
they walked to the hospital through hollow and sounding streets. Angus and Leora kept up a high-strung chatter, while Martin stalked beside them,
silent,  sulky,  proud of being sulky. Skittering through a garage alley they came out on the mass of Zenith General Hospital, a block long, five
stories  of  bleak  windows  with infrequent dim blotches of light. No one was about. The first floor was but five feet from the ground, and they
lifted Leora up to the limestone ledge of a half-open corridor window. She slid in, whispering, "G' night! Thanks!"

Martin  felt  empty,  dissatisfied. The night was full of a chill mournfulness. A light was suddenly flickering in a window above them, and there
was  a  woman's  scream  breaking down into moans. He felt the tragedy of parting--that in the briefness of life he should lose one moment of her
living presence.

"I'm going in after her; see she gets there safe," he said.

The  frigid  edge  of  the stone sill bit his hands, but he vaulted, thrust up his knee, crawled hastily through the window. Ahead of him, in the
cork-floored  hallway  lit  only  by  a  tiny  electric  globe, Leora was tiptoeing toward a flight of stairs. He ran after her, on his toes. She
squeaked as he caught her arm.

"We got to say good night better than that!" he grumbled. "With that damn' Duer--"

"Ssssssh! They'd simply murder me if they caught you here. Do you want to get me fired?"

"Would you care, if it was because of me?"

"Yes--no--well-- BUT they'd probably fire you from medic school, my lad. If--" His caressing hands could feel her shiver with anxiety. She peered
along  the  corridor,  and  his quickened imagination created sneaking forms, eyes peering from doorways. She sighed, then, resolutely: "We can't
talk here. We'll slip up to my room--roommate's away for the week. Stand there, in the shadow. If nobody's in sight upstairs, I'll come back."

He  followed her to the floor above, to a white door, then breathlessly inside. As he closed the door he was touched by this cramped refuge, with
its  camp-beds  and  photographs  from  home  and  softly wrinkled linen. He clasped her, but with hand against his chest she forbade him, as she
mourned:

"You were jealous again! How can you distrust me so? With that fool! Women not like him? They wouldn't have a chance! Likes himself too well. And
then you jealous!"

"I  wasn't-- Yes, I was, but I don't dare! To have to sit there and grin like a hyena, with him between us, when I wanted to talk to you, to kiss
you! All right! Probably I'll always be jealous. It's you that have got to trust me. I'm not easy-going; never will be. Oh, trust me--"

Their  profound  and  unresisted  kiss was the more blind in memory of that barren hour with Angus. They forgot that the superintendent of nurses
might  dreadfully  come bursting in; they forgot that Angus was waiting. "Oh, curse Angus--let him go home!" was Martin's only reflection, as his
eyes closed and his long loneliness vanished.

"Good night, dear love--my love forever," he exulted.

In  the  still ghostliness of the hall, he laughed as he thought of how irritably Angus must have marched away. But from the window he discovered
Angus  huddled on the stone steps, asleep. As he touched the ground, he whistled, but stopped short. He saw bursting from the shadow a bulky man,
vaguely in a porter's uniform, who was shouting:

"I've caught yuh! Back you come into the hospital, and we'll find out what you've been up to!"

They  closed. Martin was wiry, but in the watchman's clasp he was smothered. There was a reek of dirty overalls, of unbathed flesh. Martin kicked
his shins, struck at his boulder of red cheek, tried to twist his arm. He broke loose, started to flee, and halted. The struggle, in its contrast
to the aching sweetness of Leora, had infuriated him. He faced the watchman, raging.

From  the awakened Angus, suddenly appearing beside him, there was a thin sound of disgust. "Oh, come ON! Let's get out of this. Why do you dirty
your hands on scum like him?"

The watchman bellowed, "Oh, I'm scum, am I? I'll show you!"

He collared Angus and slapped him.

Under  the  sleepy street-lamp, Martin saw a man go mad. It was not the unfeeling Angus Duer who stared at the watchman; it was a killer, and his
eyes  were  the terrible eyes of the killer, speaking to the least experienced a message of death. He gasped only, "He dared to touch me!" A pen-
knife was somehow in his hands, he had leaped at the watchman, and he was busily and earnestly endeavoring to cut his throat.

As  Martin tried to hold them he heard the agitated pounding of a policeman's night stick on the pavement. Martin was slim but he had pitched hay
and  strung  telephone  wire. He hit the watchman, judiciously, beside the left ear, snatched Angus's wrist, and dragged him away. They ran up an
alley, across a courtyard. They came to a thoroughfare as an owl trolley glowed and rattled round the corner; they ran beside it, swung up on the
steps, and were safe.

Angus  stood  on  the  back platform, sobbing. "My God, I wish I'd killed him! He laid his filthy hands on me! Martin! Hold me here on the car. I
thought I'd got over that. Once when I was a kid I tried to kill a fellow-- God, I wish I'd cut that filthy swine's throat!"

As  the  trolley came into the center of the city, Martin coaxed, "There's an all-night lunch up Oberlin Avenue where we can get some white mule.
Come on. It'll straighten you up."

Angus  was  shaky  and stumbling--Angus the punctilious. Martin led him into the lunch-room where, between catsup bottles, they had raw whisky in
granite-like  coffee  cups.  Angus  leaned  his  head on his arm and sobbed, careless of stares, till he had drunk himself into obliteration, and
Martin  steered him home. Then to Martin, in his furnished room with Clif snoring, the evening became incredible and nothing more incredible than
Angus Duer. "Well, he'll be a good friend of mine now, for always. Fine!"

Next  morning,  in  the hall of the Anatomy Building, he saw Angus and rushed toward him. Angus snapped; "You were frightfully stewed last night,
Arrowsmith. If you can't handle your liquor better than that, you better cut it out entirely."

He walked on, clear-eyed, unruffled.




Chapter 8



And  always Martin's work went on--assisting Max Gottlieb, instructing bacteriological students, attending lectures and hospital demonstrations--
sixteen  merciless  hours  to  the  day. He stole occasional evenings for original research or for peering into the stirring worlds of French and
German  bacteriological  publications; he went proudly now and then to Gottlieb's cottage where, against rain-smeared brown wallpaper, were Blake
drawings and a signed portrait of Koch. But the rest was nerve-gnawing.

Neurology, O.B., internal medicine, physical diagnosis; always a few pages more than he could drudge through before he fell asleep at his rickety
study-table.

Memorizing of gynecology, of ophthalmology, till his mind was burnt raw.

Droning afternoons of hospital demonstrations, among stumbling students barked at by tired clinical professors.

The competitive exactions of surgery on dogs, in which Angus Duer lorded it with impatient perfection.

Martin admired the professor of internal medicine, T. J. H. Silva, known as "Dad" Silva, who was also dean of the medical faculty. He was a round
little  man  with  a  little  crescent  of  mustache. Silva's god was Sir William Osler, his religion was the art of sympathetic healing, and his
patriotism  was  accurate  physical diagnosis. He was a Doc Vickerson of Elk Mills, grown wiser and soberer and more sure. But Martin's reverence
for Dean Silva was counterbalanced by his detestation for Dr. Roscoe Geake, professor of otolaryngology.

Roscoe  Geake was a peddler. He would have done well with oil stock. As an otolaryngologist he believed that tonsils had been placed in the human
organism  for  the  purpose of providing specialists with closed motors. A physician who left the tonsils in any patient was, he felt, foully and
ignorantly  overlooking  his future health and comfort--the physician's future health and comfort. His earnest feeling regarding the nasal septum
was  that  it  never  hurt  any  patient  to  have part of it removed, and if the most hopeful examination could find nothing the matter with the
patient's  nose  and throat except that he was smoking too much, still, in any case, the enforced rest after an operation was good for him. Geake
denounced  this  cant  about  Letting  Nature  Alone.  Why,  the average well-to-do man appreciated attention! He really didn't think much of his
specialists  unless he was operated on now and then--just a little and not very painfully. Geake had one classic annual address in which, winging
far above otolaryngology, he evaluated all medicine, and explained to grateful healers like Irving Watters the method of getting suitable fees:

"Knowledge  is  the  greatest  thing in the medical world but it's no good whatever unless you can sell it, and to do this you must first impress
your  personality  on  the  people  who  have  the dollars. Whether a patient is a new or an old friend, you must always use SALESMANSHIP on him.
Explain to him, also to his stricken and anxious family, the hard work and thought you are giving to his case, and so make him feel that the good
you  have done him, or intend to do him, is even greater than the fee you plan to charge. Then, when he gets your bill, he will not misunderstand
or kick."



II


There was, as yet, no vision in Martin of serene spaciousness of the mind. Beyond doubt he was a bustling young man, and rather shrill. He had no
uplifted  moments  when  he saw himself in relation to the whole world--if indeed he realized that there was a deal of the world besides himself.
His  friend  Clif was boorish, his beloved Leora was rustic, however gallant she might be, and he himself wasted energy in hectic busyness and in
astonishment  at  dullness.  But  if he had not ripened, yet he was close to earth, he did hate pretentiousness, he did use his hands, and he did
seek iron actualities with a curiosity inextinguishable.

And  at  infrequent  times  he perceived the comedy of life; relaxed for a gorgeous hour from the intensity wearing to his admirers. Such was the
hour before Christmas vacation when Roscoe Geake rose to glory.

It  was  announced  in  the  Winnemac  Daily  News  that Dr. Geake had been called from the chair of otolaryngology to the vice-presidency of the
puissant New Idea Medical Instrument and Furniture Company of Jersey City. In celebration he gave a final address to the entire medical school on
"The Art and Science of Furnishing the Doctor's Office."

He was a neatly finished person, Geake, eye-glassed and enthusiastic and fond of people. He beamed on his loving students and cried:

"Gentlemen, the trouble with too many doctors, even those splendid old pioneer war-horses who through mud and storm, through winter's chill blast
and  August's  untempered  heat, go bringing cheer and surcease from pain to the world's humblest, yet even these old Nestors not so infrequently
settle  down  in a rut and never shake themselves loose. Now that I am leaving this field where I have labored so long and happily, I want to ask
every man jack of you to read, before you begin to practice medicine, not merely your Rosenau and Howell and Gray, but also, as a preparation for
being  that  which  all  good  citizens  must  be,  namely, practical men, a most valuable little manual of modern psychology, 'How to Put Pep in
Salesmanship,'  by Grosvenor A. Bibby. For don't forget, gentlemen, and this is my last message to you, the man worth while is not merely the man
who  takes  things  with a smile but also the man who's trained in philosophy, PRACTICAL philosophy, so that instead of day-dreaming and spending
all  his  time  talking  about  'ethics,'  splendid  though  they  are,  and 'charity,' glorious virtue though that be, yet he never forgets that
unfortunately  the  world  judges  a  man by the amount of good hard cash he can lay away. The graduates of the University of Hard Knocks judge a
physician  as they judge a business man, not merely by his alleged 'high ideals' but by the horsepower he puts into carrying them out--and making
them  pay!  And  from a scientific standpoint, don't overlook the fact that the impression of properly remunerated competence which you make on a
patient  is of just as much importance, in these days of the new psychology, as the drugs you get into him or the operations he lets you get away
with.  The  minute he begins to see that other folks appreciate and reward your skill, that minute he must begin to feel your power and so to get
well.

"Nothing  is more important in inspiring him than to have such an office that as soon as he steps into it, you have begun to sell him the idea of
being  properly  cured.  I  don't care whether a doctor has studied in Germany, Munich, Baltimore, and Rochester. I don't care whether he has all
science  at his fingertips, whether he can instantly diagnose with a considerable degree of accuracy the most obscure ailment, whether he has the
surgical  technique  of  a  Mayo,  a  Crile,  a Blake, an Ochsner, a Cushing. If he has a dirty old office, with hand-me-down chairs and a lot of
second-hand  magazines,  then  the patient isn't going to have confidence in him; he is going to resist the treatment--and the doctor is going to
have difficulty in putting over and collecting an adequate fee.

"To  go  far  below the surface of this matter into the fundamental philosophy and esthetics of office-furnishing for the doctor, there are today
two  warring  schools,  the  Tapestry School and the Aseptic School, if I may venture to so denominate and conveniently distinguish them. Both of
them  have their merits. The Tapestry School claims that luxurious chairs for waiting patients, handsome hand-painted pictures, a bookcase jammed
with  the  world's  best  literature  in  expensively  bound  sets, together with cut-glass vases and potted palms, produce an impression of that
opulence  which  can  come only from sheer ability and knowledge. The Aseptic School, on the other hand, maintains that what the patient wants is
that  appearance  of  scrupulous  hygiene  which can be produced only by furnishing the outer waiting-room as well as the inner offices in white-
painted chairs and tables, with merely a Japanese print against a gray wall.

"But,  gentlemen,  it  seems  obvious  to  me,  so  obvious  that I wonder it has not been brought out before, that the ideal reception-room is a
combination  of  these  two schools! Have your potted palms and handsome pictures--to the practical physician they are as necessary a part of his
working  equipment  as  a sterilizer or a Baumanometer. But so far as possible have everything in sanitary-looking white--and think of the color-
schemes  you  can  evolve,  or  the good wife for you, if she be one blessed with artistic tastes! Rich golden or red cushions, in a Morris chair
enameled  the  purest  white!  A  floor-covering  of white enamel, with just a border of delicate rose! Recent and unspotted numbers of expensive
magazines,  with  art  covers,  lying  on a white table! Gentlemen, there is the idea of imaginative salesmanship which I wish to leave with you;
there  is  the  gospel  which I hope to spread in my fresh field of endeavor, the New Idea Instrument Company of Jersey City, where at any time I
shall be glad to see and shake by the hand any and all of you."



III


Through  the  storm  of  his  Christmas  examinations, Martin had an intensified need of Leora. She had been summoned home to Dakota, perhaps for
months,  on  the  ground  that  her mother was unwell, and he had, or thought he had, to see her daily. He must have slept less than four hours a
night. Grinding at examinations on the interurban car, he dashed in to her, looking up to scowl when he thought of the lively interns and the men
patients  whom  she  met in the hospital, scorning himself for being so primitive, and worrying all over again. To see her at all, he had to wait
for  hours in the lobby, or walk up and down in the snow outside till she could slip to a window and peep out. When they were together, they were
completely absorbed. She had a genius for frank passion; she teased him, tantalized him, but she was tender and unafraid.

He  was  sick  lonely  when  he  saw  her  off at the Union Station. His examination papers were competent but, save in bacteriology and internal
medicine, they were sketchy. He turned emptily to the laboratory for vacation time.

He  had  so  far  displayed  more  emotion  than  achievement  in his tiny original researches. Gottlieb was patient. "It iss a fine system, this
education. All what we cram into the students, not Koch and two dieners could learn. Do not worry about the research. We shall do it yet." But he
expected  Martin  to  perform a miracle or two in the whole fortnight of the holidays and Martin had no stomach with which to think. He played in
the laboratory; he spent his time polishing glassware, and when he transplanted cultures from his rabbits, his notes were incomplete.

Gottlieb  was  instantly grim. "Was gibt es dann? Do you call these notes? Always when I praise a man must he stop working? Do you think that you
are a Theobald Smith or a Novy that you should sit and meditate? You have the ability of Pfaff!"

For  once, Martin was impenitent. He mumbled to himself, as Gottlieb stamped out like a Grand Duke, "Rats, I've got SOME rest coming to me. Gosh,
most  fellows,  why,  they  go  to  swell  homes  for  vacation, and have dances and fathers and everything. If Leora was here, we'd go to a show
tonight."

He  viciously seized his cap (a soggy and doubtful object), sought Clif Clawson, who was spending the vacation in sleeping between poker games at
Barney's,  and  outlined  a  project  of  going into town and getting drunk. It was executed so successfully that during vacation it was repeated
whenever  he thought of the coming torture-wheel of uninspiring work, whenever he realized that it was only Gottlieb and Leora who held him here.
After  vacation, in late January, he found that whisky relieved him from the frenzy of work, from the terror of loneliness--then betrayed him and
left  him  the more weary, the more lonely. He felt suddenly old; he was twenty-four now, he reminded himself, and a schoolboy, his real work not
even begun. Clif was his refuge; Clif admired Leora and would listen to his babbling of her.

But Clif and Martin came to the misfortune of Founder's Day.



IV


January  thirtieth,  the birthday of the late Dr. Warburton Stonedge, founder of the medical department of Winnemac, was annually celebrated by a
banquet rich in fraternalism and speeches and large lack of wine. All the faculty reserved their soundest observations for the event, and all the
students were expected to be present.

This  year it was held in the large hall of the University Y.M.C.A., a moral apartment with red wall paper, portraits of whiskered alumni who had
gone  out  to  be  missionaries,  and  long  thin pine boxes intended to resemble exposed oak beams. About the famous guests--Dr. Rouncefield the
Chicago  surgeon, a diabetes specialist from Omaha, a Pittsburgh internist--stood massed the faculty members. They tried to look festal, but they
were  worn  and  nervous  after  four months of school. They had wrinkles and tired eyes. They were all in business suits, mostly unpressed. They
sounded  scientific  and  interested; they used words like phlebarteriectasia and hepatocholangio-enterostomy, and they asked the guests, "So you
just been in Rochester? What's, uh, what're Charley and Will doing in orthopedics?" But they were full of hunger and melancholy. It was half-past
seven, and they who did not normally dine at seven, dined at six-thirty.

Upon this seedy gaiety entered a splendor, a tremendous black-bearded personage, magnificent of glacial shirt-bosom, vast of brow, wild-eyed with
genius  or  with madness. In a marvelous great voice, with a flavor of German accent, he inquired for Dr. Silva, and sailed into the dean's group
like a frigate among fishing-smacks.

"Who the dickens is that?" wondered Martin.

"Let's  edge  in and find out," said Clif, and they clung to the fast increasing knot about Dean Silva and the mystery, who was introduced as Dr.
Benoni Carr, the pharmacologist.

They  heard  Dr.  Carr, to the pale admiration of the school-bound assistant professors, boom genially of working with Schmiedeberg in Germany on
the  isolation  of  dihydroxypentamethylendiamin, of the possibilities of chemotherapy, of the immediate cure of sleeping sickness, of the era of
scientific  healing. "Though I am American-born, I have the advantage of speaking German from a child, and so perhaps I can better understand the
work of my dear friend Ehrlich. I saw him receive a decoration from His Imperial Highness the Kaiser. Dear old Ehrlich, he was like a child!"

There  was  at this time (but it changed curiously in 1914 and 1915) an active Germanophile section of the faculty. They bent before this tornado
of  erudition.  Angus  Duer  forgot  that  he  was  Angus  Duer;  and Martin listened with excited stimulation. Benoni Carr had all of Gottlieb's
individuality,  all  his scorn of machine-made teachers, all his air of a great world which showed Mohalis as provincial, with none of Gottlieb's
nervous touchiness. Martin wished Gottlieb were present; he wondered whether the two giants would clash.

Dr. Carr was placed at the speakers' table, near the dean. Martin was astonished to see the eminent pharmacologist, after a shocked inspection of
the  sour  chicken  and mishandled salad which made up most of the dinner, pour something into his water glass from a huge silver flask--and pour
that  something  frequently.  He  became  boisterous.  He  leaned  across two men to slap the indignant dean on the shoulder; he contradicted his
neighbors; he sang a stanza of "I'm Bound Away for the Wild Missourai."

Few phenomena at the dinner were so closely observed by the students as the manners of Dr. Benoni Carr.

After  an  hour of strained festivity, when Dean Silva had risen to announce the speakers, Carr lumbered to his feet and shouted, "Let's not have
any speeches. Only fools make speeches. Wise men sing songs. Whoopee! Oh, tireolee, oh, tireolee, oh, tireolee a lady! You profs are the bunk!"

Dean  Silva  was to be seen beseeching him, then leading him out of the room, with the assistance of two professors and a football tackle, and in
the hush of a joyful horror Clif grunted to Martin:

"Here's where I get mine! And the damn' fool promised to stay sober!"

"Huh?"

"I might of known he'd show up stewed and spill the beans. Oh, maybe the dean won't hand me hell proper!"

He  explained.  Dr.  Benoni  Carr  was  born Benno Karkowski. He had graduated from a medical school which gave degrees in two years. He had read
vastly,  but  he  had  never been in Europe. He had been "spieler" in medicine shows, chiropodist, spiritualist medium, esoteric teacher, head of
sanitariums  for  the  diversion  of neurotic women. Clif had encountered him in Zenith, when they were both drunk. It was Clif who had told Dean
Silva that the celebrated pharmacologist, just back from Europe, was in Zenith for a few days and perhaps might accept an invitation--

The dean had thanked Clif ardently.

The banquet ended early, and there was inadequate attention to Dr. Rouncefield's valuable address on the Sterilization of Catgut.

Clif  sat  up  worrying,  and admitting the truth of Martin's several observations. Next day--he had a way with women when he deigned to take the
trouble--he  pumped the dean's girl secretary, and discovered his fate. There had been a meeting of a faculty committee; the blame for the Benoni
Carr outrage had been placed on Clif; and the dean had said all the things Clif had imagined, with a number which he had not possessed the talent
to conceive. But the dean was not going to summon him at once; he was going to keep him waiting in torture, then execute him in public.

"Good-by,  old  M.D.  degree! Rats, I never thought much of the doctor business. Guess I'll be a bond salesman," said Clif to Martin. He strolled
away, he went to the dean, and remarked:

"Oh,  Dean  Silva,  I  just dropped in to tell you I've decided to resign from the medic school. Been offered a big job in, uh, in Chicago, and I
don't think much of the way you run the school, anyway. Too much memorizing and too little real spirit of science. Good luck, Doc. So long."

"Gggggg--" said Dean Silva.

Clif moved into Zenith, and Martin was left alone. He gave up the double room at the front of his boarding-house for a hall-room at the rear, and
in  that narrow den he sat and mourned in a desolation of loneliness. He looked out on a vacant lot in which a tattered advertisement of pork and
beans flapped on a leaning billboard. He saw Leora's eyes and heard Clif's comfortable scoffing, and the quiet was such as he could not endure.




Chapter 9



The  persistent  yammer  of a motor horn drew Martin to the window of the laboratory, a late afternoon in February. He looked down on a startling
roadster,  all  streamlines  and  cream  paint, with enormous headlights. He slowly made out that the driver, a young man in coffee-colored loose
motor coat and hectic checked cap and intense neckwear, was Clif Clawson, and that Clif was beckoning.

He hastened down, and Clif cried:

"Oh,  boy!  How  do you like the boat? Do you diagnose this suit? Scotch heather--honest! Uncle Clif has nabbed off a twenty-five-buck-a-week job
WITH  commissions,  selling  autos.  Boy,  I was lost in your old medic school. I can sell anything to anybody. In a year I'll be making eighty a
week. Jump in, old son. I'm going to take you in to the Grand and blow you to the handsomest feed you ever stuffed into your skinny organism."

The  thirty-eight  miles  an hour at which Clif drove into Zenith was, in 1908, dismaying speed. Martin discovered a new Clif. He was as noisy as
ever,  but  more  sure,  glowing with schemes for immediately acquiring large sums of money. His hair, once bushy and greasy in front, tending to
stick  out jaggedly behind, was sleek now, and his face had the pinkness of massage. He stopped at the fabulous Grand Hotel with a jar of brakes;
before  he  left  the  car  he  changed his violent yellow driving-gauntlets for a pair of gray gloves with black stitching, which he immediately
removed as he paraded through the lobby. He called the coat-girl "Sweetie," and at the dining-room door he addressed the head-waiter:

"Ah,  Gus, how's the boy, how's the boy feeling tonight? How's the mucho famoso majordomoso? Gus, want to make you 'quainted with Dr. Arrowsmith.
Any  time  the  doc comes here I want you to shake a leg and hand him out that well-known service, my boy, and give him anything he wants, and if
he's  broke,  you  charge  it  to me. Now, Gus, I want a nice little table for two, with garage and hot and cold water, and wouldst fain have thy
advice, Gustavus, on the oysters and hore duffers and all the ingredients fair of a Maecenan feast."

"Yes, sir, right this way, Mr. Clawson," breathed the headwaiter.

Clif whispered to Martin, "I've got him like that in two weeks! You watch my smoke!"

While  Clif  was ordering, a man stopped beside their table. He resembled an earnest traveling-man who liked to get back to his suburban bungalow
every Saturday evening. He was beginning to grow slightly bald, slightly plump. His rimless eyeglasses, in the midst of a round smooth face, made
him seem innocent. He stared about as though he wished he had someone with whom to dine. Clif darted up, patted the man's elbow, and bawled:

"Ah, there, Babski, old boy. Feeding with anybody? Come join the Sporting Gents' Association."

"All right, be glad to. Wife's out of town," said the man.

"Shake  hands  with  Dr. Arrowsmith Mart, meet George F. Babbitt, the hoch-gecelebrated Zenith real-estate king. Mr. Babbitt has just adorned his
thirty-fourth birthday by buying his first benzine buggy from yours truly and beg to remain as always."

It  was,  at  least  on  the  part  of Clif and Mr. Babbitt, a mirthful affair, and when Martin had joined them in cocktails, St. Louis beer, and
highballs, he saw that Clif was the most generous person now living, and Mr. George F. Babbitt a companion of charm.

Clif explained how certain he was--apparently his distinguished medical training had something to do with it--to be president of a motor factory,
and Mr. Babbitt confided:

"You fellows are a lot younger than I am, eight-ten years, and you haven't learned yet, like I have, that where the big pleasure is, is in Ideals
and Service and a Public Career. Now just between you and me and the gatepost, my vogue doesn't lie in real estate but in oratory. Fact, one time
I  planned  to  study  law  and  go right in for politics. Just between ourselves, and I don't want this to go any farther, I've been making some
pretty  good  affiliations lately--been meeting some of the rising young Republican politicians. Of course a fellow has got to start in modestly,
but  I  may say, sotto voce, that I expect to run for alderman next fall. It's practically only a step from that to mayor and then to governor of
the  state,  and  if I find the career suits me, there's no reason why in ten or twelve years, say in 1918 or 1920, I shouldn't have the honor of
representing the great state of Winnemac in Washington, D. C.!"

In  the  presence  of a Napoleon like Clif and a Gladstone like George F. Babbitt, Martin perceived his own lack of power and business skill, and
when  he  had returned to Mohalis he was restless. Of his poverty he had rarely thought, but now, in contrast to Clif's rich ease, his own shabby
clothes and his pinched room seemed shameful.



II


A  long  letter from Leora, hinting that she might not be able to return to Zenith, left him the more lonely. Nothing seemed worth doing. In that
listless  state  he was mooning about the laboratory during elementary bacteriology demonstration hour, when Gottlieb sent him to the basement to
bring  up  six male rabbits for inoculation. Gottlieb was working eighteen hours a day on new experiments; he was jumpy and testy; he gave orders
like  insults.  When Martin came dreamily back with six females instead of males, Gottlieb shrieked at him, "You are the worst fool that was ever
in this lab!"

The  groundlings,  second-year  men  who  were  not unmindful of Martin's own scoldings, tittered like small animals, and jarred him into raging,
"Well, I couldn't make out what you said. And it's the first time I ever fell down. I won't stand your talking to me like that!"

"You will stand anything I say! Clumsy! You can take your hat and get out!"

"You mean I'm fired as assistant?"

"I am glad you haf enough intelligence to understand that, no matter how wretched I talk!"

Martin  flung  away.  Gottlieb  suddenly  looked  bewildered  and  took a step toward Martin's retreating back. But the class, the small giggling
animals,  they  stood delighted, hoping for more, and Gottlieb shrugged, glared them into terror, sent the least awkward of them for the rabbits,
and went on, curiously quiet.

And  Martin,  at  Barney's  dive,  was hotly drinking the first of the whiskys which sent him wandering all night, by himself. With each drink he
admitted  that  he  had  an  excellent  chance  to  become  a drunkard, and with each he boasted that he did not care. Had Leora been nearer than
Wheatsylvania  twelve  hundred  miles  away, he would have fled to her for salvation. He was still shaky next morning, and he had already taken a
drink to make it possible to live through the morning when he received the note from Dean Silva bidding him report to the office at once.

The dean lectured:

"Arrowsmith,  you've been discussed a good deal by the faculty council of late. Except in one or two courses--in my own I have no fault to find--
you  have  been  very  inattentive. Your marks have been all right, but you could do still better. Recently you have also been drinking. You have
been seen in places of very low repute, and you have been intimate with a man who took it upon himself to insult me, the Founder, our guests, and
the University. Various faculty members have complained of your superior attitude--making fun of our courses right out in class! But Dr. Gottlieb
has  always  warmly defended you. He insisted that you have a real flair for investigative science. Last night, however, he admitted that you had
recently  been  impertinent  to  him. Now unless you immediately turn over a new leaf, young man, I shall have to suspend you for the rest of the
year and, if that doesn't do the work, I shall have to ask for your resignation. And I think it might be a good thing for your humility--you seem
to have the pride of the devil, young man!--it might be a good idea for you to see Dr. Gottlieb and start off your reformation by apologizing--"

It was the whisky spoke, not Martin:

"I'm damned if I will! He can go to the devil! I've given him my life, and then he tattles on me--"

"That's absolutely unfair to Dr. Gottlieb. He merely--"

"Sure.  He  merely  let  me down. I'll see him in hell before I'll apologize, after the way I've worked for him. And as for Clif Clawson that you
were hinting at--him 'take it on himself to insult anybody'? He just played a joke, and you went after his scalp. I'm glad he did it!"

Then Martin waited for the words that would end his scientific life.

The little man, the rosy, pudgy, good little man, he stared and hummed and spoke softly:

"Arrowsmith,  I  could  fire  you  right  now,  of  course,  but I believe you have good stuff in you. I decline to let you go. Naturally, you're
suspended,  at  least  till  you  come to your senses and apologize to me and to Gottlieb." He was fatherly; almost he made Martin repent; but he
concluded,  "And as for Clawson, his 'joke' regarding this Benoni Carr person--and why I never looked the fellow up is beyond me, I suppose I was
too  busy--his  'joke,'  as you call it, was the action either of an idiot or a blackguard, and until you are able to perceive that fact, I don't
think you will be ready to come back to us."

"All right," said Martin, and left the room.

He  was  very sorry for himself. The real tragedy, he felt, was that though Gottlieb had betrayed him and ended his career, ended the possibility
of his mastering science and of marrying Leora, he still worshiped the man.

He  said  good-by to no one in Mohalis save his landlady. He packed, and it was a simple packing. He stuffed his books, his notes, a shabby suit,
his  inadequate  linen, and his one glory, the dinner clothes, into his unwieldy imitation-leather bag. He remembered with drunken tears the hour
of buying the dinner jacket.

Martin's money, from his father's tiny estate, came in bimonthly checks from the bank at Elk Mills. He had now but six dollars.

In Zenith he left his bag at the interurban trolley station and sought Clif, whom he found practicing eloquence over a beautiful pearl-gray motor
hearse, in which a beer-fed undertaker was jovially interested. He waited, sitting hunched and twisted on the steel running-board of a limousine.
He resented but he was too listless to resent greatly the stares of the other salesmen and the girl stenographers.

Clif dashed up, bumbling, "Well, well, how's the boy? Come out and catchum little drink."

"I could use one."

Martin  knew that Clif was staring at him. As they entered the bar of the Grand Hotel, with its paintings of lovely but absent-minded ladies, its
mirrors, its thick marble rail along a mahogany bar, he blurted:

"Well,  I  got  mine, too. Dad Silva's fired me, for general footlessness. I'm going to bum around a little and then get some kind of a job. God,
but I'm tired and nervous! Say, can you lend me some money?"

"You bet. All I've got. How much you want?"

"Guess I'll need a hundred dollars. May drift around quite some time."

"Golly, I haven't got that much, but prob'ly I can raise it at the office. Here, sit down at this table and wait for me."

How Clif obtained the hundred dollars has never been explained, but he was back with it in a quarter-hour. They went on to dinner, and Martin had
much too much whisky. Clif took him to his own boarding-house--which was decidedly less promissory of prosperity than Clif's clothes--firmly gave
him  a  cold  bath  to bring him to, and put him to bed. Next morning he offered to find a job for him, but Martin refused and left Zenith by the
northbound train at noon.

Always, in America, there remains from pioneer days a cheerful pariahdom of shabby young men who prowl causelessly from state to state, from gang
to  gang, in the power of the Wanderlust. They wear black sateen shirts, and carry bundles. They are not permanently tramps. They have home towns
to  which  they  return, to work quietly in the factory or the section-gang for a year--for a week--and as quietly to disappear again. They crowd
the  smoking  cars  at  night;  they  sit  silent on benches in filthy stations; they know all the land yet of it they know nothing, because in a
hundred  cities  they  see  only  the employment agencies, the all-night lunches, the blind-pigs, the scabrous lodging-houses. Into that world of
voyageurs  Martin vanished. Drinking steadily, only half-conscious of whither he was going, of what he desired to do, shamefully haunted by Leora
and  Clif  and the swift hands of Gottlieb, he flitted from Zenith to the city of Sparta, across to Ohio, up into Michigan, west to Illinois. His
mind  was  a  shambles.  He  could  never  quite  remember,  afterward,  where  he  had  been. Once, it is clear, he was soda-fountain clerk in a
Minnemagantic  drug-store.  Once he must have been, for a week, dishwasher in the stench of a cheap restaurant. He wandered by freight trains, on
blind baggages, on foot. To his fellow prospectors he was known as "Slim," the worst-tempered and most restless of all their company.

After  a  time a sense of direction began to appear in his crazy drifting. He was instinctively headed westward, and to the west, toward the long
prairie dusk, Leora was waiting. For a day or two he stopped drinking. He woke up feeling not like the sickly hobo called "Slim," but like Martin
Arrowsmith, and he pondered, with his mind running clear, "Why shouldn't I go back? Maybe this hasn't been so bad for me. I was working too hard.
I was pretty high-strung. Blew up. Like to, uh-- Wonder what happened to my rabbits? . . . Will they ever let me do research again?"

But  to  return  to the University before he had seen Leora was impossible. His need of her was an obsession, making the rest of earth absurd and
worthless.  He  had, with blurry cunning, saved most of the hundred dollars he had taken from Clif; he had lived--very badly, on grease--swimming
stews  and soda-reeking bread--by what he earned along the way. Suddenly, on no particular day, in no particular town in Wisconsin, he stalked to
the station, bought a ticket to Wheatsylvania, North Dakota, and telegraphed to Leora, "Coming 2:43 tomorrow Wednesday Sandy."



III


He  crossed  the  wide  Mississippi  into Minnesota. He changed trains at St. Paul; he rolled into gusty vastnesses of snow, cut by thin lines of
fence-wire.  He  felt  free,  in  release  from the little fields of Winnemac and Ohio, in relaxation from the shaky nerves of midnight study and
midnight  booziness.  He  remembered his days of wire-stringing in Montana and regained that careless peace. Sunset was a surf of crimson, and by
night,  when  he  stepped from the choking railroad coach and tramped the platform at Sauk Centre, he drank the icy air and looked up to the vast
and  solitary  winter  stars.  The  fan of the Northern Lights frightened and glorified the sky. He returned to the coach with the energy of that
courageous  land.  He  nodded  and  gurgled in brief smothering sleep; he sprawled on the seat and talked with friendly fellow vagrants; he drank
bitter  coffee and ate enormously of buckwheat cakes at a station restaurant; and so, changing at anonymous towns, he came at last to the squatty
shelters,  the  two  wheat-elevators,  the  cattle-pen,  the  oil-tank, and the red box of a station with its slushy platform, which composed the
outskirts  of  Wheatsylvania.  Against the station, absurd in a huge coonskin coat, stood Leora. He must have looked a little mad as he stared at
her  from the vestibule, as he shivered with the wind. She lifted to him her two open hands, childish in red mittens. He ran down, he dropped his
awkward bag on the platform and, unaware of the gaping furry farmers, they were lost in a kiss.

Years after, in a tropic noon, he remembered the freshness of her wind-cooled cheeks.

The  train was gone, pounding out of the tiny station. It had stood like a dark wall beside the platform, protecting them, but now the light from
the snowfields glared in on them and left them exposed and self-conscious.

"What--what's happened?" she fluttered. "No letters. I was so frightened."

"Off bumming. The dean suspended me--being fresh to profs. D' y' care?"

"Course not, if you wanted to--"

"I've come to marry you."

"I  don't  see  how  we  can,  dearest, but-- All right. There'll be a lovely row with Dad." She laughed. "He's always so surprised and HURT when
anything  happens that he didn't plan out. It'll be nice to have you with me in the scrap, because you aren't supposed to know that he expects to
plan  out everything for everybody and--Oh, Sandy, I've been so lonely for you! Mother isn't really a bit sick, not the least bit, but they go on
keeping  me  here. I think probably somebody hinted to Dad that folks were saying he must be broke, if his dear little daughter had to go off and
learn nursing, and he hasn't worried it all out yet--it takes Andrew Jackson Tozer about a year to worry out anything. Oh, Sandy! You're here!"

After  the  clatter  and  jam  of  the  train,  the village seemed blankly empty. He could have walked around the borders of Wheatsylvania in ten
minutes.  Probably  to  Leora  one  building  differed from another--she appeared to distinguish between the general store of Norblom and that of
Frazier  & Lamb--but to Martin the two-story wooden shacks creeping aimlessly along the wide Main Street were featureless and inappreciable. Then
"There's  our  house,  end  of  the  next  block,"  said  Leora,  as  they  turned  the corner at the feed and implement store, and in a panic of
embarrassment Martin wanted to halt. He saw a storm coming: Mr. Tozer denouncing him as a failure who desired to ruin Leora, Mrs. Tozer weeping.

"Say--say--say--have you told 'em about me?" he stammered.

"Yes.  Sort  of.  I said you were a wonder in medic school, and maybe we'd get married when you finished your internship, and then when your wire
came,  they  wanted to know why you were coming, and why it was you wired from Wisconsin, and what color necktie you had on when you were sending
the  wire,  and I couldn't make 'em understand I didn't know. They discussed it. Quite a lot. They do discuss things. All through supper. Solemn.
Oh, Sandy, do curse and swear some at meals."

He  was  in a funk. Her parents, formerly amusing figures in a story, became oppressively real in sight of the wide, brown, porchy house. A large
plate-glass  window  with  a  colored  border  had  recently  been  cut  through  the  wall,  as a sign of prosperity, and the garage was new and
authoritative.

He tagged after Leora, expecting the blast. Mrs. Tozer opened the door, and stared at him plaintively--a thin, faded, unhumorous woman. She bowed
as though he was not so much unwelcome as unexplained and doubtful.

"Will you show Mr. Arrowsmith his room, Ory, or shall I?" she peeped.

It  was  the  kind of house that has a large phonograph but no books, and if there were any pictures, as beyond hope there must have been, Martin
never remembered them. The bed in his room was lumpy but covered with a chaste figured spread, and the flowery pitcher and bowl rested on a cover
embroidered in red with lambs, frogs, water lilies, and a pious motto.

He took as long as he could in unpacking things which needed no unpacking, and hesitated down the stairs. No one was in the parlor, which smelled
of furnace-heat and balsam pillows; then, from nowhere apparent, Mrs. Tozer was there, worrying about him and trying to think of something polite
to say.

"Did you have a comfortable trip on the train?"

"Oh, yes, it was-- Well, it was pretty crowded."

"Oh, was it crowded?"

"Yes, there were a lot of people traveling."

"Were  there?  I suppose-- Yes. Sometimes I wonder where all the people can be going that you see going places all the time. Did you--was it very
cold in the Cities--in Minneapolis and St. Paul?"

"Yes, it was pretty cold."

"Oh, was it cold?"

Mrs.  Tozer was so still, so anxiously polite. He felt like a burglar taken for a guest, and intensely he wondered where Leora could be. She came
in  serenely,  with  coffee  and  a  tremendous Swedish coffee-ring voluptuous with raisins and glistening brown sugar, and she had them talking,
almost  easily, about the coldness of winter and the value of Fords when into the midst of all this brightness slid Mr. Andrew Jackson Tozer, and
they drooped again to politeness.

Mr.  Tozer  was  as  thin and undistinguished and sun-worn as his wife, and like her he peered, he kept silence and fretted. He was astonished by
everything in the world that did not bear on his grain elevator, his creamery, his tiny bank, the United Brethren Church, and the careful conduct
of  an Overland car. It was not astounding that he should have become almost rich, for he accepted nothing that was not natural and convenient to
Andrew Jackson Tozer.

He hinted a desire to know whether Martin "drank," how prosperous he was, and how he could possibly have come all this way from the urbanities of
Winnemac.  (The  Tozers  were  born  in  Illinois, but they had been in Dakota since childhood, and they regarded Wisconsin as the farthest, most
perilous  rim  of  the  Eastern horizon.) They were so blank, so creepily polite, that Martin was able to avoid such unpleasant subjects as being
suspended. He dandled an impression that he was an earnest young medic who in no time at all would be making large and suitable sums of money for
the support of their Leora, but as he was beginning to lean back in his chair he was betrayed by the appearance of Leora's brother.

Bert  Tozer,  Albert  R.  Tozer,  cashier  and  vice-president of the Wheatsylvania State Bank, auditor and vice-president of the Tozer Grain and
Storage  Company,  treasurer and vice-president of the Star Creamery, was not in the least afflicted by the listening dubiousness of his parents.
Bertie  was  a  very  articulate  and  modern man of affairs. He had buck teeth, and on his eye-glasses was a gold chain leading to a dainty hook
behind  his  left  ear.  He  believed  in  town-boosting,  organized motor tours, Boy Scouts, baseball, and the hanging of I.W.W.'s; and his most
dolorous  regret  was  that Wheatsylvania was too small--as yet--to have a Y.M.C.A. or a Commercial Club. Plunging in beside him was his fiancee,
Miss  Ada Quist, daughter of the feed and implement store. Her nose was sharp, but not so sharp as her voice or the suspiciousness with which she
faced Martin.

"This Arrowswith?" demanded Bert. "Huh! Well, guess you're glad to be out here in God's country!"

"Yes, it's fine--"

"Trouble  with  the Eastern states is, they haven't got the git, or the room to grow. You ought to see a real Dakota harvest! Look here, how come
you're away from school this time of year?"

"Why--"

"I know all about school-terms. I went to business college in Grand Forks. How come you can get away now?"

"I took a little lay-off."

"Leora says you and her are thinking of getting married."

"We--"

"Got any cash outside your school-money?"

"I have not!"

"Thought so! How juh expect to support a wife?"

"I suppose I'll be practicing medicine some day."

"Some day! Then what's the use of talking about being engaged till you can support a wife?"

"That," interrupted Bert's lady-love, Miss Ada Quist, "that's just what _I_ said, Ory!" She seemed to speak with her pointed nose as much as with
her button of a mouth. "If Bert and I can wait, I guess other people can!"

Mrs. Tozer whimpered, "Don't be too hard on Mr. Arrowsmith, Bertie. I'm sure he wants to do the right thing."

"I'm  not  being  hard  on anybody! I'm being sensible. If Pa and you would tend to things instead of standing around fussing, I wouldn't have to
butt  in.  I  don't  believe  in  interfering  with  anybody else's doings, or anybody interfering with mine. Live and let live and mind your own
business  is  my  motto, and that's what I said to Alec Ingleblad the other day when I was in there having a shave and he was trying to get funny
about  our  holding so many mortgages, but I'll be blamed if I'm going to allow a fellow that I don't know anything about to come snooping around
My Sister till I find out something about his prospects!"

Leora crooned, "Bertie, lamb, your tie is climbing your collar again."

"Yes and YOU, Ory," shrieked Bert, "if it wasn't for me you'd have married Sam Petchek, two years ago!"

Bert further said, with instances and illustrations, that she was light-minded, and as for nursing-- NURSING!

She said that Bert was what he was, and tried to explain to Martin the matter of Sam Petchek. (It has never yet been altogether explained.)

Ada Quist said that Leora did not care if she broke her dear parents' hearts and ruined Bert's career.

Martin  said,  "Look  here,  I--"  and  never got farther. Mr. and Mrs. Tozer said they were all to be calm, and of course Bert didn't mean-- But
really, it was true; they had to be sensible, and how Mr. Arrowsmith could expect to support a wife--

The conference lasted till nine-thirty, which, as Mr. Tozer pointed out, was everybody's bedtime, and except for the five-minute discussion as to
whether  Miss  Ada Quist was to stay to supper, and the debate on the saltiness of this last cornbeef, they clave faithfully to the inquiry as to
whether  Martin  and  Leora  were engaged. All persons interested, which apparently did not include Martin and Leora, decided that they were not.
Bert  ushered  Martin  upstairs. He saw to it that the lovers should not have a chance for a good-night kiss; and until Mr. Tozer called down the
hall,  at seven minutes after ten, "You going to stay up and chew the rag the whole blessed night, Bert?" he made himself agreeable by sitting on
Martin's  bed,  looking derisively at his shabby baggage, and demanding the details of his parentage, religion, politics, and attitude toward the
horrors of card-playing and dancing.

At breakfast they all hoped that Martin would stay one more night in their home--plenty of room.

Bert stated that Martin would come down-town at ten and be shown the bank, creamery, and wheat elevator.

But at ten Martin and Leora were on the eastbound train. They got out at the county seat, Leopolis, a vast city of four thousand population, with
a  three-story  building.  At  one that afternoon they were married, by the German Lutheran pastor. His study was a bareness surrounding a large,
rusty wood-stove, and the witnesses, the pastor's wife and an old German who had been shoveling walks, sat on the wood-box and looked drowsy. Not
till  they  had  caught the afternoon train for Wheatsylvania did Martin and Leora escape from the ghostly apprehension which had hunted them all
day.  In  the fetid train, huddled close, hands locked, innocently free of the alienation which the pomposity of weddings sometimes casts between
lovers, they sighed, "Now what are we going to do--what ARE we going to do?"

At the Wheatsylvania station they were met by the whole family, rampant.

Bert  had  suspected elopement. He had searched half a dozen towns by long-distance telephone, and got through to the county clerk just after the
license had been granted. It did not soften Bert's mood to have the clerk remark that if Martin and Leora were of age, there was nothing he could
do, and he didn't "care a damn who's talking--I'm running this Office!"

Bert had come to the station determined to make Martin perfect, even as Bert Tozer was perfect, and to do it right now.

It was a dreadful evening in the Tozer mansion.

Mr. Tozer said, with length, that Martin had undertaken responsibilities.

Mrs. Tozer wept, and said that she hoped Ory had not, for certain reasons, HAD to be married--

Bert said that if such was the case, he'd kill Martin--

Ada Quist said that Ory could now see what came of pride and boasting about going off to her old Zenith--

Mr. Tozer said that there was one good thing about it, anyway: Ory could see for herself that they couldn't let her go back to nursing school and
get into more difficulties--

Martin  from  time  to  time offered remarks to the effect that he was a good young man, a wonderful bacteriologist, and able to take care of HIS
wife; but no one save Leora listened.

Bert further propounded (while his father squeaked, "Now don't be TOO hard on the boy,") that if Martin THOUGHT for one single SECOND that he was
going  to  get one red CENT out of the Tozers because he'd gone and butted IN where nobody'd INVITED him, he, Bert, wanted to KNOW about it, that
was all, he certainly wanted to KNOW about it!

And  Leora  watched  them,  turning her little head from one to another. Once she came over to press Martin's hand. In the roughest of the storm,
when  Martin  was  beginning  to  glare,  she drew from a mysterious pocket a box of very bad cigarettes, and lighted one. None of the Tozers had
discovered  that she smoked. Whatever they thought about her sex morals, her infidelity to United Brethrenism, and her general dementia, they had
not suspected that she could commit such an obscenity as smoking. They charged on her, and Martin caught his breath savagely.

During  these  fulminations Mr. Tozer had somehow made up his mind. He could at times take the lead away from Bert, whom he considered useful but
slightly indiscreet, and unable to grasp the "full value of a dollar." (Mr. Tozer valued it at one dollar and ninety, but the progressive Bert at
scarce more than one-fifty.) Mr. Tozer mildly gave orders:

They  were to stop "scrapping." They had no proof that Martin was necessarily a bad match for Ory. They would see. Martin would return to medical
school  at  once, and be a good boy and get through as quickly as he could and begin to earn money. Ory would remain at home and behave herself--
and she certainly would never act like a Bad Woman again, and smoke cigarettes. Meantime Martin and she would have no, uh, relations. (Mrs. Tozer
looked  embarrassed,  and  the  hungrily  attentive Ada Quist tried to blush.) They could write to each other once a week, but that was all. They
would in no way, uh, act as though they were married till he gave permission.

"Well?" he demanded.

Doubtless  Martin  should  have  defied  them  and  with  his  bride  in  his arms have gone forth into the night. But it seemed only a moment to
graduation,  to  beginning  his  practice.  He  had  Leora now, forever. For her, he must be sensible. He would return to work, and be Practical.
Gottlieb's ideals of science? Laboratories? Research? Rot!

"All right," he said.

It  did not occur to him that their abstention from love began tonight; it did not come to him till, holding out his hands to Leora, smiling with
virtue at having determined to be prudent, he heard Mr. Tozer cackling, "Ory, you go on up to bed now--in your own room!"

That was his bridal night; tossing in his bed, ten yards from her.

Once  he  heard  a door open, and thrilled to her coming. He waited, taut. She did not come. He peeped out, determined to find her room. His deep
feeling  about  his  brother-in-law  suddenly  increased.  Bert was parading the hall, on guard. Had Bert been more formidable, Martin might have
killed  him, but he could not face that buck-toothed and nickering righteousness. He lay and resolved to curse them all in the morning and go off
with Leora, but with the coming of the three-o'clock depression he perceived that with him she would probably starve, that he was disgraced, that
it was not at all certain he would not become a drunkard.

"Poor kid, I'm not going to spoil her life. God, I do love her! I'm going back, and the way I'm going to work-- Can I stand this?"

That was his bridal night and the barren dawn.

Three days later he was walking into the office of Dr. Silva, dean of the Winnemac Medical School.




Chapter 10



Dean Silva's secretary looked up delightedly, she hearkened with anticipation. But Martin said meekly, "Please, could I see the dean?" and meekly
he waited, in the row of oak chairs beneath the Dawson Hunziker pharmaceutical calendar.

When  he had gone solemnly through the ground-glass door to the dean's office, he found Dr. Silva glowering. Seated, the little man seemed large,
so domed was his head, so full his rounding mustache.

"Well, sir!"

Martin  pleaded,  "I'd  like  to  come  back,  if you'll let me. Honest, I do apologize to you, and I'll go to Dr. Gottlieb and apologize--though
honest, I can't lay down on Clif Clawson--"

Dr. Silva bounced up from his chair, bristling. Martin braced himself. Wasn't he welcome? Had he no home, anywhere? He could not fight. He had no
more  courage.  He  was  so  tired  after  the drab journey, after restraining himself from flaring out at the Tozers. He was so tired! He looked
wistfully at the dean.

The  little man chuckled, "Never mind, boy. It's all right! We're glad you're back. Bother the apologies! I just wanted you to do whatever'd buck
you up. It's good to have you back! I believed in you, and then I thought perhaps we'd lost you. Clumsy old man!"

Martin was sobbing, too weak for restraint, too lonely and too weak, and Dr. Silva soothed, "Let's just go over everything and find out where the
trouble  was.  What can I do? Understand, Martin, the thing I want most in life is to help give the world as many good physicians, great healers,
as I can. What started your nervousness? Where have you been?"

When  Martin  came  to  Leora and his marriage, Silva purred, "I'm delighted! She sounds like a splendid girl. Well, we must try and get you into
Zenith General for your internship, a year from now, and make you able to support her properly."

Martin remembered how often, how astringently, Gottlieb had sneered at "dese merry vedding or jail bells." He went away Silva's disciple; he went
away to study furiously; and the brilliant insanity of Max Gottlieb's genius vanished from his faith.



II


Leora wrote that she had been dropped from the school of nursing for over-absence and for being married. She suspected that it was her father who
had  informed  the  hospital authorities. Then, it appeared, she had secretly sent for a shorthand book and, on pretense of helping Bert, she was
using the typewriter in the bank, hoping that by next autumn she could join Martin and earn her own living as a stenographer.

Once he offered to give up medicine, to take what work he could find and send for her. She refused.

Though  in  his service to Leora and to the new god, Dean Silva, he had become austere, denying himself whisky, learning page on page of medicine
with  a  frozen  fury,  he was always in a vacuum of desire for her, and always he ran the last block to his boarding-house, looking for a letter
from  her.  Suddenly  he had a plan. He had tasted shame--this one last shame would not matter. He would flee to her in Easter vacation; he would
compel  Tozer to support her while she studied stenography in Zenith; he would have her near him through the last year. He paid Clif the borrowed
hundred, when the bi-monthly check came from Elk Mills, and calculated his finances to the penny. By not buying the suit he distressingly needed,
he  could  manage it. Then for a month and more he had but two meals a day, and of those meals one was bread and butter and coffee. He washed his
own linen in the bath-tub and, except for occasional fiercely delightful yieldings, he did not smoke.

His return to Wheatsylvania was like his first flight, except that he talked less with fellow tramps, and all the way, between uneasy naps in the
red-plush  seats of coaches, he studied the bulky books of gynecology and internal medicine. He had written certain instructions to Leora. He met
her on the edge of Wheatsylvania and they had a moment's talk, a resolute kiss.

News  spreads  not  slowly  in  Wheatsylvania. There is a certain interest in other people's affairs, and the eyes of citizens of whose existence
Martin  did not know had followed him from his arrival. When the culprits reached the bone-littered castle of the Tozer ogres, Leora's father and
brother were already there, and raging. Old Andrew Jackson cried out upon them. He said that conceivably it may not have been insane in Martin to
have  "run  away  from  school  once, but to go and sneak back this second time was absolutely plumb crazy." Through his tirade, Martin and Leora
smiled confidently.

From  Bert,  "By  God,  sir,  this is too much!" Bert had been reading fiction. "I object to the use of profanity, but when you come and annoy My
Sister a second time, all I can say is, by God, sir, this is too blame much!"

Martin  looked  meditatively  out  of the widow. He noticed three people strolling the muddy street. They all viewed the Tozer house with hopeful
interest. Then he spoke steadily:

"Mr.  Tozer, I've been working hard. Everything has gone fine. But I've decided I don't care to live without my wife. I've come to take her back.
Legally,  you  can't  prevent  me.  I'll  admit, without any argument, I can't support her yet, if I stay in the University. She's going to study
stenography. She'll be supporting herself in a few months, and meanwhile I expect you to be decent enough to send her money."

"This  IS  too much," said Tozer, and Bert carried it on: "Fellow not only practically ruins a girl but comes and demands that we support her for
him!"

"All right. Just as you want. In the long run it'll be better for her and for me and for you if I finish medic school and have my profession, but
if you won't take care of her, I'll chuck school, I'll go to work. Oh, I'll support her, all right! Only you'll never see her again. If you go on
being  idiots, she and I will leave here on the night train for the Coast, and that'll be the end." For the first time in his centuries of debate
with  the  Tozers, he was melodramatic. He shook his fist under Bert's nose. "And if you try to prevent our going, God help you! And the way this
town will laugh at you! . . . How about it, Leora? Are you ready to go away with me--forever?"

"Yes," she said.

They  discussed  it,  greatly.  Tozer  and Bert struck attitudes of defense. They couldn't, they said, be bullied by anybody. Also, Martin was an
Adventurer,  and  how  did Leora know he wasn't planning to live on the money they sent her? In the end they crawled. They decided that this new,
mature Martin, this new, hard-eyed Leora were ready to throw away everything for each other.

Mr. Tozer whined a good deal, and promised to send her seventy dollars a month till she should be prepared for office-work.

At  the Wheatsylvania station, looking from the train window, Martin realized that this anxious-eyed, lip-puckering Andrew Jackson Tozer did love
his daughter, did mourn her going.



III


He  found  for  Leora  a room on the frayed northern edge of Zenith, miles nearer Mohalis and the University than her hospital had been; a square
white  and  blue room, with blotchy but shoulder-wise chairs. It looked out on breezy, stubbly waste land reaching to distant glittering railroad
tracks. The landlady was a round German woman with an eye for romance. It is doubtful if she ever believed that they were married. She was a good
woman.

Leora's  trunk had come. Her stenography books were primly set out on her little table and her pink felt slippers were arranged beneath the white
iron  bed.  Martin  stood  with  her  at the window, mad with the pride of proprietorship. Suddenly he was so weak, so tired, that the mysterious
cement  which  holds  cell to cell seemed dissolved, and he felt that he was collapsing. But with knees rigidly straightening, his head back, his
lips tight across his teeth, he caught himself, and cried, "Our first home!"

That he should be with her, quiet, none disturbing, was intoxication.

The  commonplace  room  shone  with  peculiar  light;  the vigorous weeds and rough grass of the waste land were radiant under the April sun, and
sparrows were cheeping.

"Yes," said Leora, with voice, then hungry lips.



IV


Leora  attended  the Zenith University of Business Administration and Finance, which title indicated that it was a large and quite reasonably bad
school  for  stenographers,  bookkeepers,  and  such  sons of Zenith brewers and politicians as were unable to enter even state universities. She
trotted  daily  to  the  car-line,  a neat, childish figure with note-books and sharpened pencils, to vanish in the horde of students. It was six
months before she had learned enough stenography to obtain a place in an insurance office.

Till  Martin  graduated  they  kept that room, their home, ever dearer. No one was so domestic as these birds of passage. At least two evenings a
week  Martin  dashed  in  from  Mohalis and studied there. She had a genius for keeping out of his way, for not demanding to be noticed, so that,
while  he  plunged  into his books as he never had done in Clif's rustling, grunting, expectorating company, he had ever the warm, half-conscious
feeling  of her presence. Sometimes, at midnight, just as he began to realize that he was hungry, he would find that a plate of sandwiches had by
silent  magic  appeared  at  his elbow. He was none the less affectionate because he did not comment. She made him secure. She shut out the world
that had pounded at him.

On  their  walks,  at dinner, in the dissolute and deliciously wasteful quarter-hour when they sat on the edge of the bed with comforters wrapped
about  them  and smoked an inexcusable cigarette before breakfast, he explained his work to her, and when her own studying was done, she tried to
read  whichever  of his books was not in use. Knowing nothing, never learning much, of the actual details of medicine, yet she understood--better
it  may  be than Angus Duer--his philosophy and the basis of his work. If he had given up Gottlieb-worship and his yearning for the laboratory as
for a sanctuary, if he had resolved to be a practical and wealth-mastering doctor, yet something of Gottlieb's spirit remained. He wanted to look
behind  details  and  impressive-sounding  lists  of  technical terms for the causes of things, for general rules which might reduce the chaos of
dissimilar and contradictory symptoms to the orderliness of chemistry.

Saturday  evening  they  went solemnly to the motion pictures--one-and two-reel films with Cowboy Billy Anderson and a girl later to be famous as
Mary  Pickford--and  solemnly  they  discussed the non-existent plots as they returned, unconscious of other people on the streets; but when they
walked  into the country on a Sunday (with four sandwiches and a bottle of ginger ale in his threadbare pockets), he chased her up-hill and down-
gully,  and  they  lost  their  solemnity  in  joyous childishness. He intended, when he came to her room in the evening, to catch the owl-car to
Mohalis  and  be near his work when he woke in the morning. He was resolute about it, always, and she admired his efficiency, but he never caught
the  car.  The crew of the six o'clock morning interurban became used to a pale, quick-moving young man who sat hunched in a back seat, devouring
large red books, absently gnawing a rather dreadful doughnut. But in this young man there was none of the heaviness of workers dragged out of bed
at dawn for another gray and futile day of labor. He appeared curiously determined, curiously content.

It  was  all so much easier, now that he was partly freed from the tyrannical honesty of Gottliebism, from the unswerving quest for causes which,
as it drove through layer below layer, seemed ever farther from the bottommost principles, from the intolerable strain of learning day by day how
much he did not know. It warmed him to escape from Gottlieb's ice-box into Dean Silva's neighborly world.

Now and then he saw Gottlieb on the campus. They bowed in embarrassment and passed in haste.



V


There  seemed to be no division between his Junior and Senior years. Because of the time he had lost, he had to remain in Mohalis all summer. The
year and a half from his marriage to his graduation was one whirling bewilderment, without seasons or dates.

When  he  had, as they put it, "cut out his nonsense and buckled down to work," he had won the admiration of Dr. Silva and all the Good Students,
especially  Angus  Duer and the Reverend Ira Hinkley. Martin had always announced that he did not care for their approbation, for the applause of
commonplace  drudges, but now that he had it, he prized it. However much he scoffed, he was gratified when he was treated as a peer by Angus, who
spent the summer as extern in the Zenith General Hospital, and who already had the unapproachable dignity of a successful young surgeon.

Through that hot summer Martin and Leora labored, panting, and when they sat in her room, over their books and a stout pot of beer, neither their
costumes  nor  their  language had the decorum which one ought to expect from a romantic pair devoted to science and high endeavor. They were not
very  modest.  Leora  came  to  use,  in her casual way, such words, such ancient Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, as would have dismayed Angus or Bert
Tozer.  On their evenings off they went economically to an imitation Coney Island beside a scummy and stinking lake, and with grave pleasure they
ate Hot Dogs, painstakingly they rode the scenic railway.

Their  chief  appetizer  was Clif Clawson. Clif was never willingly alone or silent except when he was asleep. It is probable that his success in
motor-salesmanship  came  entirely from his fondness for the enormous amounts of bright conversation which seem necessary in that occupation. How
much  of  his  attention  to  Martin  and  Leora was friendliness and how much of it was due to his fear of being alone cannot be determined, but
certainly  he  entertained  them  and  drew  them  out  of themselves, and never seemed offended by the surly unwillingness with which Martin was
sometimes guilty of greeting him.

He would come roaring up to the house in a motor, the muffler always cut out. He would shout at their window, "Come on, you guys! Come out of it!
Shake a leg! Lez have a little drive and get cooled off, and then I'll buy you a feed."

That Martin had to work, Clif never comprehended. There was small excuse for Martin's occasional brutality in showing his annoyance but, now that
he  was  fulfilled in Leora and quite thoroughly and selfishly careless as to what hungry need others might have of himself, now that he was in a
rut  of  industry  and  satisfied  companionship, he was bored by Clif's unchanging flood of heavy humor. It was Leora who was courteous. She had
heard  rather  too  often  the  seven  jokes which, under varying guises, made up all of Clif's humor and philosophy, but she could sit for hours
looking  amiable while Clif told how clever he was at selling, and she sturdily reminded Martin that they would never have a friend more loyal or
generous.

But Clif went to New York, to a new motor agency, and Martin and Leora were more completely and happily dependent on each other than ever before.

Their  last  agitation  was removed by the complacence of Mr. Tozer. He was cordial now in all his letters, however much he irritated them by the
parental advice with which he penalized them for every check he sent.



VI


None  of the hectic activities of Senior year--neurology and pediatrics, practical work in obstetrics, taking of case-histories in the hospitals,
attendance  on operations, dressing wounds, learning not to look embarrassed when charity patients called one "Doctor"--was quite so important as
the discussion of "What shall we do after graduation?"

Is  it  necessary to be an intern for more than a year? Shall we remain general practitioners all our lives, or work toward becoming specialists?
Which  specialties are the best--that is, the best paid? Shall we settle in the country or in the city? How about going West? What about the army
medical corps; salutes, riding-boots, pretty women, travel?

This  discussion  they  harried  in  the  corridors  of Main Medical, at the hospital, at lunch-rooms; and when Martin came home to Leora he went
through it all again, very learnedly, very explanatorily. Almost every evening he "reached a decision" which was undecided again by morning.

Once  when  Dr.  Loizeau,  professor  of  surgery, had operated before a clinic which included several renowned visiting doctors--the small white
figure  of  the  surgeon below them, slashing between life and death, dramatic as a great actor taking his curtain-call--Martin came away certain
that  he  was for surgery. He agreed then with Angus Duer, who had just won the Hugh Loizeau Medal in Experimental Surgery, that the operator was
the  lion,  the eagle, the soldier among doctors. Angus was one of the few who knew without wavering precisely what he was going to do: after his
internship  he  was to join the celebrated Chicago clinic headed by Dr. Rouncefield, the eminent abdominal surgeon. He would, he said briefly, be
making twenty thousand a year as a surgeon within five years.

Martin  explained  it  all  to  Leora.  Surgery. Drama. Fearless nerves. Adoring assistants. Save lives. Science in devising new techniques. Make
money--not be commercial, of course, but provide Leora with comforts. To Europe--they two together--gray London. Viennese cafes. Leora was useful
to  him  during  his oration. She blandly agreed; and the next evening, when he sought to prove that surgery was all rot and most surgeons merely
good carpenters, she agreed more amiably than ever.

Next  to  Angus, and the future medical missionary, Ira Hinkley, Fatty Pfaff was the first to discover what his future was. He was going to be an
obstetrician--or, as the medical students called it technically, a "baby-snatcher." Fatty had the soul of a midwife; he sympathized with women in
their  gasping agony, sympathized honestly and almost tearfully, and he was magnificent at sitting still and drinking tea and waiting. During his
first  obstetrical  case,  when  the student with him was merely nervous as they fidgeted by the bed in the hard desolation of the hospital room,
Fatty  was  terrified,  and  he  longed as he had never longed for anything in his flabby yet wistful life to comfort this gray-faced, straining,
unknown woman, to take her pains on himself.

While the others drifted, often by chance, often through relatives, into their various classes, Martin remained doubtful. He admired Dean Silva's
insistence  on  the physician's immediate service to mankind, but he could not forget the cool ascetic hours in the laboratory. Toward the end of
Senior  year, decision became necessary, and he was moved by a speech in which Dean Silva condemned too much specialization and pictured the fine
old  country doctor, priest and father of his people, sane under open skies, serene in self-conquest. On top of this came urgent letters from Mr.
Tozer, begging Martin to settle in Wheatsylvania.

Tozer  loved  his daughter, apparently, and more or less liked Martin, and he wanted them near him. Wheatsylvania was a "good location," he said:
solid  Scandinavian  and  Dutch  and German and Bohemian farmers who paid their bills. The nearest doctor was Hesselink, at Groningen, nine and a
half  miles  away,  and Hesselink had more than he could do. If they would come, he would help Martin buy his equipment: he would even send him a
check now and then during his two-year hospital internship. Martin's capital was practically gone. Angus Duer and he had received appointments to
Zenith General Hospital, where he would have an incomparable training, but Zenith General gave its interns, for the first year, nothing but board
and  room,  and he had feared that he could not take the appointment. Tozer's offer excited him. All night Leora and he sat up working themselves
into  enthusiasm  about  the  freedom  of the West, about the kind hearts and friendly hands of the pioneers, about the heroism and usefulness of
country doctors, and this time they reached a decision which remained decided.

They would settle in Wheatsylvania.

If  he  ached  a  little  for  research  and  Gottlieb's  divine  curiosity--well, he would be such a country doctor as Robert Koch! He would not
degenerate  into  a  bridge-playing,  duck-hunting  drone.  He  would  have  a small laboratory of his own. So he came to the end of the year and
graduated,  looking  rather  flustered in his cap and gown. Angus stood first and Martin seventh in the class. He said good-by, with lamentations
and  considerable  beer;  he  found a room for Leora nearer to the hospital; and he emerged as Martin L. Arrowsmith, M.D., house physician in the
Zenith General Hospital.




Chapter 11



The Boardman Box Factory was afire. All South Zenith was agitated by the glare on the low-hung clouds, the smell of scorched timber, the infernal
bells  of  charging  fire-apparatus. Miles of small wooden houses west of the factory were threatened, and shawled women, tousled men in trousers
over nightshirts, tumbled out of bed and came running with a thick mutter of footsteps in the night-chilled streets.

With  professional  calmness,  firemen  in helmets were stoking the dripping engines. Policemen tramped in front of the press of people, swinging
their  clubs,  shouting,  "Get  back  there, you!" The fire-line was sacred. Only the factory-owner and the reporters were admitted. A crazy-eyed
factory-hand was stopped by a police sergeant.

"My tools are in there!" he shrieked.

"That don't make no never-minds," bawled the strutting sergeant. "NOBODY can't get through here!"

But  one  got through. They heard the blang-blang-blang of a racing ambulance, incessant, furious, defiant. Without orders, the crowd opened, and
through  them,  almost grazing them, slid the huge gray car. At the back, haughty in white uniform, nonchalant on a narrow seat, was The Doctor--
Martin Arrowsmith.

The crowd admired him, the policemen sprang to receive him.

"Where's the fireman got hurt?" he snapped.

"Over in that shed," cried the police sergeant, running beside the ambulance.

"Drive over closer. Nev' mind the smoke!" Martin barked at the driver.

A lieutenant of firemen led him to a pile of sawdust on which was huddled an unconscious youngster, his face bloodless and clammy.

"He got a bad dose of smoke from the green lumber and keeled over. Fine kid. Is he a goner?" the lieutenant begged.

Martin knelt by the man, felt his pulse, listened to his breathing. Brusquely opening a black bag, he gave him a hypodermic of strychnin and held
a vial of ammonia to his nose. "He'll come around. Here, you two, getum into the ambulance--hustle!"

The police sergeant and the newest probationer patrolman sprang together, and together they mumbled, "All right, Doc."

To Martin came the chief reporter of the Advocate-Times. In years he was only twenty-nine, but he was the oldest and perhaps the most cynical man
in the world. He had interviewed senators; he had discovered graft in charity societies and even in prize-fights. There were fine wrinkles beside
his  eyes, he rolled Bull Durham cigarettes constantly, and his opinion of man's honor and woman's virtue was but low. Yet to Martin, or at least
to The Doctor, he was polite.

"Will he pull through, Doc?" he twanged.

"Sure, I think so. Suffocation. Heart's still going."

Martin  yelped  the  last  words  from the step at the back of the ambulance as it went bumping and rocking through the factory yard, through the
bitter  smoke,  toward  the shrinking crowd. He owned and commanded the city, he and the driver. They ignored traffic regulations, they disdained
the  people,  returning  from theaters and movies, who dotted the streets which unrolled before the flying gray hood. Let 'em get out of the way!
The  traffic  officer  at  Chickasaw  and  Twentieth heard them coming, speeding like the Midnight Express--urrrrrr--blang-blang-blang-blang--and
cleared  the  noisy  corner.  People  were  jammed  against  the  curb, threatened by rearing horses and backing motors, and past them hurled the
ambulance, blang-blang-blang-blang, with The Doctor holding a strap and swinging easily on his perilous seat.

At the hospital, the hall-man cried, "Shooting case in the Arbor, Doc."

"All  right.  Wait'll  I sneak in a drink," said Martin placidly. On the way to his room he passed the open door of the hospital laboratory, with
its hacked bench, its lifeless rows of flasks and test-tubes.

"Huh! That stuff! Poking 'round labs! This is real sure-enough life," he exulted, and he did not permit himself to see the vision of Max Gottlieb
waiting there, so gaunt, so tired, so patient.



II


The  six interns in Zenith General, including Martin and Angus Duer, lived in a long dark room with six camp beds, and six bureaus fantastic with
photographs  and  ties and undarned socks. They spent hours sitting on their beds, arguing surgery versus internal medicine, planning the dinners
which  they  hoped  to enjoy on their nights off, and explaining to Martin, as the only married man, the virtues of the various nurses with whom,
one by one, they fell in love.

Martin found the hospital routine slightly dull. Though he developed the Intern's Walk, that quick corridor step with the stethoscope conspicuous
in  the pocket, he did not, he could not, develop the bedside manner. He was sorry for the bruised, yellowed, suffering patients, always changing
as to individuals and never changing as a mass of drab pain, but when he had thrice dressed a wound, he had had enough; he wanted to go on to new
experiences. Yet the ambulance work outside the hospital was endlessly stimulating to his pride.

The  Doctor, and The Doctor alone, was safe by night in the slum called "the Arbor." His black bag was a pass. Policemen saluted him, prostitutes
bowed  to  him  without  mockery,  saloon-keepers  called out, "Evenin', Doc," and hold-up men stood back in doorways to let him pass. Martin had
power, the first obvious power in his life. And he was led into incessant adventure.

He  took  a  bank-president  out  of  a dive; he helped the family conceal the disgrace; he irritably refused their bribe; and afterward, when he
thought  of  how  he might have dined with Leora, he was sorry he had refused it. He broke into hotel-rooms reeking with gas and revived would-be
suicides.  He  drank  Trinidad  rum  with  a  Congressman who advocated prohibition. He attended a policeman assaulted by strikers, and a striker
assaulted by policemen. He assisted at an emergency abdominal operation at three o'clock in the morning. The operating-room--white tile walls and
white  tile  floor  and  glittering  frosted-glass  skylight--seemed  lined  with  fire-lit  ice, and the large incandescents glared on the glass
instrument  cases, the cruel little knives. The surgeon, in long white gown, white turban, and pale orange rubber gloves, made his swift incision
in  the  square  of  yellowish  flesh  exposed  between  towels, cutting deep into layers of fat, and Martin looked on unmoved as the first blood
menacingly followed the cut. And a month after, during the Chaloosa River flood, he worked for seventy-six hours, with half-hours of sleep in the
ambulance or on a police-station table.

He  landed  from  a  boat at what had been the second story of a tenement and delivered a baby on the top floor; he bound up heads and arms for a
line  of  men;  but  what gave him glory was the perfectly foolhardy feat of swimming the flood to save five children marooned and terrified on a
bobbing  church  pew.  The newspapers gave him large headlines, and when he had returned to kiss Leora and sleep twelve hours, he lay and thought
about research with salty self-defensive scorn.

"Gottlieb, the poor old impractical fusser! I'd like to see him swim that current!" jeered Dr. Arrowsmith to Martin.

But  on  night  duty,  alone,  he  had  to face the self he had been afraid to uncover, and he was homesick for the laboratory, for the thrill of
uncharted  discoveries,  the  quest  below  the  surface  and  beyond  the  moment,  the search for fundamental laws which the scientist (however
blasphemously  and  colloquially  he may describe it) exalts above temporary healing as the religious exalts the nature and terrible glory of God
above  pleasant  daily  virtues.  With this sadness there was envy that he should be left out of things, that others should go ahead of him, ever
surer  in technique, more widely aware of the phenomena of biological chemistry, more deeply daring to explain laws at which the pioneers had but
fumbled and hinted.

In  his  second  year of internship, when the thrills of fires and floods and murder became as obvious a routine as bookkeeping, when he had seen
the  strangely  few ways in which mankind can contrive to injure themselves and slaughter one another, when it was merely wearing to have to live
up  to the pretentiousness of being The Doctor, Martin tried to satisfy and perhaps kill his guilty scientific lust by voluntary scrabbling about
the  hospital laboratory, correlating the blood counts in pernicious anemia. His trifling with the drug of research was risky. Amid the bustle of
operations  he  began  to picture the rapt quietude of the laboratory. "I better cut this out," he said to Leora, "if I'm going to settle down in
Wheatsylvania and tend to business and make a living--and I by golly am!"

Dean  Silva  often  came to the hospital on consultations. He passed through the lobby one evening when Leora, returned from the office where she
was  a  stenographer, was meeting Martin for dinner. Martin introduced them, and the little man held her hand, purred at her, and squeaked, "Will
you children give me the pleasure of taking you to dinner? My wife has deserted me. I am a lone and misanthropic man."

He  trotted between them, round and happy. Martin and he were not student and teacher, but two doctors together, for Dean Silva was one pedagogue
who  could still be interested in a man who no longer sat at his feet. He led the two starvelings to a chop-house and in a settle-walled booth he
craftily stuffed them with roast goose and mugs of ale.

He concentrated on Leora, but his talk was of Martin:

"Your husband must be an Artist Healer, not a picker of trifles like these laboratory men."

"But Gottlieb's no picker of trifles," insisted Martin.

"No-o.  But with him-- It's a difference of one's gods. Gottlieb's gods are the cynics, the destroyers--crapehangers the vulgar call 'em: Diderot
and  Voltaire  and Elser; great men, wonder-workers, yet men that had more fun destroying other people's theories than creating their own. But my
gods now, they're the men who took the discoveries of Gottlieb's gods and turned them to the use of human beings--made them come alive!

"All  credit  to  the  men  who  invented paint and canvas, but there's more credit, eh? to the Raphaels and Holbeins who used those discoveries!
Laennec and Osler, those are the men! It's all very fine, this business of pure research: seeking the truth, unhampered by commercialism or fame-
chasing.  Getting  to  the  bottom.  Ignoring  consequences and practical uses. But do you realize if you carry that idea far enough, a man could
justify  himself  for  doing nothing but count the cobblestones on Warehouse Avenue--yes and justify himself for torturing people just to see how
they screamed--and then sneer at a man who was making millions of people well and happy!

"No,  no!  Mrs.  Arrowsmith,  this  lad  Martin is a passionate fellow, not a drudge. He must be passionate on behalf of mankind. He's chosen the
highest  calling  in the world, but he's a feckless, experimental devil. You must keep him at it, my dear, and not let the world lose the benefit
of his passion."

After  this  solemnity Dad Silva took them to a musical comedy and sat between them, patting Martin's shoulder, patting Leora's arm, choking with
delight  when the comedian stepped into the pail of whitewash. In midnight volubility Martin and Leora sputtered their affection for him, and saw
their Wheatsylvania venture as glory and salvation.

But a few days before the end of Martin's internship and their migration to North Dakota, they met Max Gottlieb on the street.

Martin  had  not  seen  him for more than a year; Leora never. He looked worried and ill. While Martin was agonizing as to whether to pass with a
bow, Gottlieb stopped.

"How is everything, Martin?" he said cordially. But his eyes said, "Why have you never come back to me?"

The boy stammered something, nothing, and when Gottlieb had gone by, stooped and moving as in pain, he longed to run after him.

Leora was demanding, "Is that the Professor Gottlieb you're always talking about?"

"Yes. Say! How does he strike you?"

"I  don't--Sandy,  he's  the greatest man I've ever seen! I don't know how I know, but he is! Dr. Silva is a darling, but that was a GREAT man! I
wish--I wish we were going to see him again. There's the first man I ever laid eyes on that I'd leave you for, if he wanted me. He's so--oh, he's
like a sword--no, he's like a brain walking. Oh, Sandy, he looked so wretched. I wanted to cry. I'd black his shoes!"

"God! So would I!"

But in the bustle of leaving Zenith, the excitement of the journey to Wheatsylvania, the scramble of his state examinations, the dignity of being
a Practicing Physician, he forgot Gottlieb, and on that Dakota prairie radiant in early June, with meadow larks on every fence post, he began his
work.




Chapter 12



At the moment when Martin met him on the street, Gottlieb was ruined.

Max  Gottlieb  was  a German Jew, born in Saxony in 1850. Though he took his medical degree, at Heidelberg, he was never interested in practicing
medicine. He was a follower of Helmholtz, and youthful researches in the physics of sound convinced him of the need of the quantitative method in
the  medical  sciences.  Then  Koch's  discoveries  drew him into biology. Always an elaborately careful worker, a maker of long rows of figures,
always  realizing the presence of uncontrollable variables, always a vicious assailant of what he considered slackness or lie or pomposity, never
too  kindly  to  well-intentioned  stupidity,  he  worked in the laboratories of Koch, of Pasteur, he followed the early statements of Pearson in
biometrics,  he  drank  beer  and  wrote  vitriolic  letters, he voyaged to Italy and England and Scandinavia, and casually, between two days, he
married (as he might have bought a coat or hired a housekeeper) the patient and wordless daughter of a Gentile merchant.

Then  began  a  series  of  experiments,  very important, very undramatic-sounding, very long, and exceedingly unappreciated. Back in 1881 he was
confirming Pasteur's results in chicken cholera immunity and, for relief and pastime, trying to separate an enzyme from yeast. A few years later,
living  on  the  tiny inheritance from his father, a petty banker, and quite carelessly and cheerfully exhausting it, he was analyzing critically
the  ptomain  theory  of  disease,  and investigating the mechanism of the attenuation of virulence of microorganisms. He got thereby small fame.
Perhaps he was over-cautious, and more than the devil or starvation he hated men who rushed into publication unprepared.

Though  he  meddled  little  in  politics,  considering them the most repetitious and least scientific of human activities, he was a sufficiently
patriotic  German  to hate the Junkers. As a youngster he had a fight or two with ruffling subalterns; once he spent a week in jail; often he was
infuriated by discriminations against Jews: and at forty he went sadly off to the America which could never become militaristic or anti-Semitic--
to the Hoagland Laboratory in Brooklyn, then to Queen City University as professor of bacteriology.

Here  he  made  his  first investigation of toxin-anti-toxin reactions. He announced that antibodies, excepting antitoxin, had no relation to the
immune  state  of  an  animal, and while he himself was being ragingly denounced in the small but hectic world of scientists, he dealt calmly and
most brutally with Yersin's and Marmorek's theories of sera.

His  dearest  dream,  now  and  for  years  of racking research, was the artificial production of antitoxin--its production in vitro. Once he was
prepared  to  publish,  but he found an error and rigidly suppressed his notes. All the while he was lonely. There was apparently no one in Queen
City  who  regarded  him as other than a cranky Jew catching microbes by their little tails and leering at them--no work for a tall man at a time
when  heroes  were building bridges, experimenting with Horseless Carriages, writing the first of the poetic Compelling Ads, and selling miles of
calico and cigars.

In  1899  he  was  called  to  the University of Winnemac, as professor of bacteriology in the medical school, and here he drudged on for a dozen
years.  Not  once  did  he  talk of results of the sort called "practical"; not once did he cease warring on the post hoc propter hoc conclusions
which  still  make  up  most  medical lore; not once did he fail to be hated by his colleagues, who were respectful to his face, uncomfortable in
feeling  his ironic power, but privily joyous to call him Mephisto, Diabolist, Killjoy, Pessimist, Destructive Critic, Flippant Cynic, Scientific
Bounder  Lacking in Dignity and Seriousness, Intellectual Snob, Pacifist, Anarchist, Atheist, Jew. They said, with reason, that he was so devoted
to  Pure  Science,  to  art  for art's sake, that he would rather have people die by the right therapy than be cured by the wrong. Having built a
shrine for humanity, he wanted to kick out of it all mere human beings.

The total number of his papers, in a brisk scientific realm where really clever people published five times a year, was not more than twenty-five
in thirty years. They were all exquisitely finished, all easily reduplicated and checked by the doubtfulest critics.

At Mohalis he was pleased by large facilities for work, by excellent assistants, endless glassware, plenty of guinea pigs, enough monkeys; but he
was  bored  by  the  round  of  teaching, and melancholy again in a lack of understanding friends. Always he sought someone to whom he could talk
without suspicion or caution. He was human enough, when he meditated upon the exaltation of doctors bold through ignorance, of inventors who were
but tinkers magnified, to be irritated by his lack of fame in America, even in Mohalis, and to complain not too nobly.

He had never dined with a duchess, never received a prize, never been interviewed, never produced anything which the public could understand, nor
experienced anything since his schoolboy amours which nice people could regard as romantic. He was, in fact, an authentic scientist.

He  was of the great benefactors of humanity. There will never, in any age, be an effort to end the great epidemics or the petty infections which
will  not  have  been  influenced  by  Max Gottlieb's researches, for he was not one who tagged and prettily classified bacteria and protozoa. He
sought  their chemistry, the laws of their existence and destruction, basic laws for the most part unknown after a generation of busy biologists.
Yet  they were right who called him "pessimist," for this man who, as much as any other, will have been the cause of reducing infectious diseases
to almost-zero often doubted the value of reducing infectious diseases at all.

He  reflected  (it was an international debate in which he was joined by a few and damned by many) that half a dozen generations nearly free from
epidemics  would  produce  a  race so low in natural immunity that when a great plague, suddenly springing from almost-zero to a world-smothering
cloud, appeared again, it might wipe out the world entire, so that the measures to save lives to which he lent his genius might in the end be the
destruction of all human life.

He  meditated  that  if science and public hygiene did remove tuberculosis and the other major plagues, the world was grimly certain to become so
overcrowded, to become such a universal slave-packed shambles, that all beauty and ease and wisdom would disappear in a famine-driven scamper for
existence. Yet these speculations never checked his work. If the future became overcrowded, the future must by birth-control or otherwise look to
itself.  Perhaps it would, he reflected. But even this drop of wholesome optimism was lacking in his final doubts. For he doubted all progress of
the  intellect  and  the  emotions,  and he doubted, most of all, the superiority of divine mankind to the cheerful dogs, the infallibly graceful
cats, the unmoral and unagitated and irreligious horses, the superbly adventuring seagulls.

While medical quacks, manufacturers of patent medicines, chewing-gum salesmen, and high priests of advertising lived in large houses, attended by
servants,  and  took  their sacred persons abroad in limousines, Max Gottlieb dwelt in a cramped cottage whose paint was peeling, and rode to his
laboratory  on  an ancient and squeaky bicycle. Gottlieb himself protested rarely. He was not so unreasonable--usually--as to demand both freedom
and the fruits of popular slavery. "Why," he once said to Martin, "should the world pay me for doing what I want and what they do not want?"

If  in his house there was but one comfortable chair, on his desk were letters, long, intimate, and respectful, from the great ones of France and
Germany,  Italy  and  Denmark, and from scientists whom Great Britain so much valued that she gave them titles almost as high as those with which
she rewarded distillers, cigarette-manufacturers, and the owners of obscene newspapers.

But  poverty  kept  him from fulfillment of his summer longing to sit beneath the poplars by the Rhine or the tranquil Seine, at a table on whose
checkered cloth were bread and cheese and wine and dusky cherries, those ancient and holy simplicities of all the world.



II


Max  Gottlieb's wife was thick and slow-moving and mute; at sixty she had not learned to speak easy English; and her German was of the small-town
bourgeois,  who  pay  their  debts and over-eat and grow red. If he was not confidential with her, if at table he forgot her in long reflections,
neither  was  he  unkind  or impatient, and he depended on her housekeeping, her warming of his old-fashioned nightgown. She had not been well of
late. She had nausea and indigestion, but she kept on with her work. Always you heard her old slippers slapping about the house.

They  had  three  children,  all born when Gottlieb was over thirty-eight: Miriam, the youngest, an ardent child who had a touch at the piano, an
instinct  about Beethoven, and hatred for the "ragtime" popular in America; an older sister who was nothing in particular; and their boy Robert--
Robert  Koch Gottlieb. He was a wild thing and a distress. They sent him, with anxiety over the cost, to a smart school near Zenith, where he met
the  sons of manufacturers and discovered a taste for fast motors and eccentric clothes, and no taste what ever for studying. At home he clamored
that  his  father was a "tightwad." When Gottlieb sought to make it clear that he was a poor man, the boy answered that out of his poverty he was
always  sneakingly spending money on his researches--he had no right to do that and shame his son--let the confounded University provide him with
material!



III


There  were  few  of Gottlieb's students who saw him and his learning as anything but hurdles to be leaped as quickly as possible. One of the few
was Martin Arrowsmith.

However  harshly  he  may  have  pointed out Martin's errors, however loftily he may have seemed to ignore his devotion, Gottlieb was as aware of
Martin  as  Martin  of him. He planned vast things. If Martin really desired his help (Gottlieb could be as modest personally as he was egotistic
and  swaggering  in  competitive science), he would make the boy's career his own. During Martin's minute original research, Gottlieb rejoiced in
his willingness to abandon conventional--and convenient--theories of immunology and in the exasperated carefulness with which he checked results.
When  Martin  for unknown reasons became careless, when he was obviously drinking too much, obviously mixed up in some absurd personal affair, it
was  tragic hunger for friends and flaming respect for excellent work which drove Gottlieb to snarl at him. Of the apologies demanded by Silva he
had no notion. He would have raged--

He  waited  for  Martin  to return. He blamed himself: "Fool! There was a fine spirit. You should have known one does not use a platinum loop for
shoveling  coal." As long as he could (while Martin was dish-washing and wandering on improbable trains between impossible towns), he put off the
appointment of a new assistant. Then all his wistfulness chilled to anger. He considered Martin a traitor, and put him out of his mind.



IV


It  is  possible  that  Max Gottlieb was a genius. Certainly he was mad as any genius. He did, during the period of Martin's internship in Zenith
General, a thing more preposterous than any of the superstitions at which he scoffed.

He  tried  to  become  an  executive  and a reformer! He, the cynic, the anarch, tried to found an Institution, and he went at it like a spinster
organizing a league to keep small boys from learning naughty words.

He  conceived that there might, in this world, be a medical school which should be altogether scientific, ruled by exact quantitative biology and
chemistry,  with  spectacle-fitting  and  most  of  surgery  ignored,  and he further conceived that such an enterprise might be conducted at the
University of Winnemac! He tried to be practical about it; oh, he was extremely practical and plausible!

"I  admit  we should not be able to turn out doctors to cure village bellyaches. And ordinary physicians are admirable and altogether necessary--
perhaps.  But  there are too many of them already. And on the 'practical' side, you gif me twenty years of a school that is precise and cautious,
and  we shall cure diabetes, maybe tuberculosis and cancer, and all these arthritis things that the carpenters shake their heads at them and call
them 'rheumatism.' So!"

He  did not desire the control of such a school, nor any credit. He was too busy. But at a meeting of the American Academy of Sciences he met one
Dr. Entwisle, a youngish physiologist from Harvard, who would make an excellent dean. Entwisle admired him, and sounded him on his willingness to
be  called to Harvard. When Gottlieb outlined his new sort of medical school, Entwisle was fervent. "Nothing I'd like so much as to have a chance
at  a  place  like  that,"  he  fluttered,  and Gottlieb went back to Mohalis triumphant. He was the more assured because (though he sardonically
refused it) he was at this time offered the medical deanship of the University of West Chippewa.

So  simple,  or  so insane, was he that he wrote to Dean Silva politely bidding him step down and hand over his school--his work, his life--to an
unknown  teacher in Harvard! A courteous old gentleman was Dad Silva, a fit disciple of Osler, but this incredible letter killed his patience. He
replied  that while he could see the value of basic research, the medical school belonged to the people of the state, and its task was to provide
them with immediate and practical attention. For himself, he hinted, if he ever believed that the school would profit by his resignation he would
go at once, but he needed a rather broader suggestion than a letter from one of his own subordinates!

Gottlieb  retorted  with  spirit  and  indiscretion.  He  damned  the  People  of the State of Winnemac. Were they, in their present condition of
nincompoopery,  worth  any  sort  of  attention?  He unjustifiably took his demand over Silva's head to that great orator and patriot, Dr. Horace
Greeley Truscott, president of the University.

President Truscott said, "Really, I'm too engrossed to consider chimerical schemes, however ingenious they may be."

"You are too busy to consider anything but selling honorary degrees to millionaires for gymnasiums," remarked Gottlieb.

Next day he was summoned to a special meeting of the University Council. As head of the medical department of bacteriology, Gottlieb was a member
of  this all-ruling body, and when he entered the long Council Chamber, with its gilt ceiling, its heavy maroon curtains, its somber paintings of
pioneers, he started for his usual seat, unconscious of the knot of whispering members, meditating on far-off absorbing things.

"Oh, uh, Professor Gottlieb, will you please sit down there at the far end of the table?" called President Truscott.

Then  Gottlieb  was  aware  of  tensions. He saw that out of the seven members of the Board of Regents, the four who lived in or near Zenith were
present.  He saw that sitting beside Truscott was not the dean of the academic department but Dean Silva. He saw that however easily they talked,
they were looking at him through the mist of their chatter.

President Truscott announced, "Gentlemen, this joint meeting of the Council and the regents is to consider charges against Professor Max Gottlieb
preferred by his dean and by myself."

Gottlieb suddenly looked old.

"These  charges  are:  Disloyalty  to  his  dean,  his  president, his regents and to the State of Winnemac. Disloyalty to recognized medical and
scholastic  ethics.  Insane  egotism.  Atheism. Persistent failure to collaborate with his colleagues, and such inability to understand practical
affairs  as makes it dangerous to let him conduct the important laboratories and classes with which we have entrusted him. Gentlemen, I shall now
prove each of these points, from Professor Gottlieb's own letters to Dean Silva."

He proved them.

The  chairman of the Board of Regents suggested, "Gottlieb, I think it would simplify things if you just handed us your resignation and permitted
us to part in good feeling, instead of having the unpleasant--"

"I'm damned if I will resign!" Gottlieb was on his feet, a lean fury. "Because you all haf schoolboy minds, golf-links minds, you are twisting my
expression, and perfectly accurate expression, of a sound revolutionary ideal, which would personally to me be of no value or advantage whatefer,
into a desire to steal promotions. That fools should judge honor--!" His long forefinger was a fish-hook, reaching for President Truscott's soul.
"No! I will not resign! You can cast me out!"

"I'm afraid, then, we must ask you to leave the room while we vote." The president was very suave, for so large and strong and hearty a man.

Gottlieb rode his wavering bicycle to the laboratory. It was by telephone message from a brusque girl clerk in the president's office that he was
informed that "his resignation had been accepted."

He  agonized,  "Discharge  me?  They  couldn't!  I'm  the  chief  glory,  the only glory, of this shopkeepers' school!" When he comprehended that
apparently  they  very much had discharged him, he was shamed that he should have given them a chance to kick him. But the really dismaying thing
was that he should by an effort to be a politician have interrupted the sacred work.

He required peace and a laboratory, at once.

They'd see what fools they were when they heard that Harvard had called him!

He was eager for the mellower ways of Cambridge and Boston. Why had he remained so long in raw Mohalis? He wrote to Dr. Entwisle, hinting that he
was willing to hear an offer. He expected a telegram. He waited a week, then had a long letter from Entwisle admitting that he had been premature
in  speaking for the Harvard faculty. Entwisle presented the faculty's compliments and their hope that some time they might have the honor of his
presence, but as things were now--

Gottlieb wrote to the University of West Chippewa that, after all, he was willing to think about their medical deanship . . . and had answer that
the place was filled, that they had not greatly liked the tone of his former letter, and they did not "care to go into the matter further."

At  sixty-one, Gottlieb had saved but a few hundred dollars--literally a few hundred. Like any bricklayer out of work, he had to have a job or go
hungry. He was no longer a genius impatient of interrupted creation but a shabby schoolmaster in disgrace.

He  prowled  through  his  little brown house, fingering papers, staring at his wife, staring at old pictures, staring at nothing. He still had a
month  of  teaching--they  had  dated ahead the resignation which they had written for him--but he was too dispirited to go to the laboratory. He
felt  unwanted,  almost  unsafe.  His  ancient sureness was broken into self-pity. He waited from delivery to delivery for the mail. Surely there
would be aid from somebody who knew what he was, what he meant. There were many friendly letters about research, but the sort of men with whom he
corresponded did not listen to intercollegiate faculty tattle nor know of his need.

He  could  not,  after the Harvard mischance and the West Chippewa rebuke, approach the universities or the scientific institutes, and he was too
proud  to write begging letters to the men who revered him. No, he would be business-like! He applied to a Chicago teachers' agency, and received
a  stilted  answer  promising  to  look  about  and inquiring whether he would care to take the position of teacher of physics and chemistry in a
suburban high school.

Before he had sufficiently recovered from his fury to be able to reply, his household was overwhelmed by his wife's sudden agony.

She  had  been  unwell for months. He had wanted her to see a physician, but she had refused, and all the while she was stolidly terrified by the
fear  that  she  had  cancer  of  the  stomach. Now when she began to vomit blood, she cried to him for help. The Gottlieb who scoffed at medical
credos, at "carpenters" and "pill mongers," had forgotten what he knew of diagnosis, and when he was ill, or his family, he called for the doctor
as desperately as any backwoods layman to whom illness was the black malignity of unknown devils.

In  unbelievable  simplicity  he  considered  that,  as  his quarrel with Silva was not personal, he could still summon him, and this time he was
justified.  Silva  came,  full of excessive benignity, chuckling to himself, "When he's got something the matter, he doesn't run for Arrhenius or
Jacques Loeb, but for me!" Into the meager cottage the little man brought strength, and Gottlieb gazed down on him trustingly.

Mrs.  Gottlieb  was suffering. Silva gave her morphine. Not without satisfaction he learned that Gottlieb did not even know the dose. He examined
her--his  pudgy  hands  had  the sensitiveness if not the precision of Gottlieb's skeleton fingers. He peered about the airless bedroom: the dark
green  curtains,  the crucifix on the dumpy bureau, the color-print of a virtuously voluptuous maiden. He was bothered by an impression of having
recently  been  in  the  room.  He remembered. It was the twin of the doleful chamber of a German grocer whom he had seen during a consultation a
month ago.

He spoke to Gottlieb not as to a colleague or an enemy but as a patient, to be cheered.

"Don't  think  there's  any  tumorous  mass.  As of course you know, Doctor, you can tell such a lot by the differences in the shape of the lower
border of the ribs, and by the surface of the belly during deep breathing."

"Oh, yesss."

"I  don't think you need to worry in the least. We'd better hustle her off to the University Hospital, and we'll give her a test meal and get her
X-rayed and take a look for Boas-Oppler bugs."

She  was  taken away, heavy, inert, carried down the cottage steps. Gottlieb was with her. Whether or not he loved her, whether he was capable of
ordinary  domestic  affection,  could  not be discovered. The need of turning to Dean Silva had damaged his opinion of his own wisdom. It was the
final  affront, more subtle and more enervating than the offer to teach chemistry to children. As he sat by her bed, his dark face was blank, and
the  wrinkles  which  deepened  across  that  mask  may  have  been sorrow, may have been fear. . . . Nor is it known how, through the secure and
uninvaded  years,  he  had regarded his wife's crucifix, which Silva had spied on their bureau--a gaudy plaster crucifix on a box set with gilded
shells.

Silva  diagnosed  it as probable gastric ulcer, and placed her on treatment, with light and frequent meals. She improved, but she remained in the
hospital  for  four  weeks,  and  Gottlieb  wondered:  Are  these doctors deceiving us? Is it really cancer, which by Their mystic craft They are
concealing from me who know naught?

Robbed  of  her  silent  assuring presence on which night by weary night he had depended, he fretted over his daughters, despaired at their noisy
piano-practice, their inability to manage the slattern maid. When they had gone to bed he sat alone in the pale lamplight, unmoving, not reading.
He  was  bewildered.  His haughty self was like a robber baron fallen into the hands of rebellious slaves, stooped under a filthy load, the proud
eye rheumy and patient with despair, the sword hand chopped off, obscene flies crawling across the gnawed wrist.

It was at this time that he encountered Martin and Leora on the street in Zenith.

He did not look back when they had passed him, but all that afternoon he brooded on them. "That girl, maybe it was she that stole Martin from me-
-from science! No! He was right. One sees what happens to the fools like me!"

On the day after Martin and Leora had started for Wheatsylvania, singing, Gottlieb went to Chicago to see the teachers' agency.

The  firm  was  controlled  by  a  Live  Wire who had once been a county superintendent of schools. He was not much interested. Gottlieb lost his
temper:  "Do  you  make  an  endeavor to find positions for teachers, or do you merely send out circulars to amuse yourself? Haf you looked up my
record? Do you know who I am?"

The  agent  roared,  "Oh,  we  know  about  you, all right, all right! I didn't when I first wrote you, but-- You seem to have a good record as a
laboratory  man, though I don't see that you've produced anything of the slightest use in medicine. We had hoped to give you a chance such as you
nor  nobody  else  ever  had.  John  Edtooth,  the  Oklahoma  oil  magnate,  has  decided  to found a university that for plant and endowment and
individuality will beat anything that's ever been pulled off in education--biggest gymnasium in the world, with an ex-New York Giant for baseball
coach!  We thought maybe we might work you in on the bacteriology or the physiology--I guess you could manage to teach that, too, if you boned up
on  it. But we've been making some inquiries. From some good friends of ours, down Winnemac way. And we find that you're not to be trusted with a
position  of  real  responsibility.  Why,  they  fired  you for general incompetence! But now that you've had your lesson-- Do you think you'd be
competent to teach Practical Hygiene in Edtooth University?"

Gottlieb  was  so angry that he forgot to speak English, and as all his cursing was in student German, in a creaky dry voice, the whole scene was
very  funny  indeed  to  the  cackling  bookkeeper  and  the girl stenographers. When he went from that place Max Gottlieb walked slowly, without
purpose, and in his eyes were senile tears.




Chapter 13



No  one  in  the  medical world had ever damned more heartily than Gottlieb the commercialism of certain large pharmaceutical firms, particularly
Dawson  T.  Hunziker  &  Co.,  Inc., of Pittsburgh. The Hunziker Company was an old and ethical house which dealt only with reputable doctors--or
practically  only  with  reputable  doctors.  It  furnished  excellent  antitoxins  for diphtheria and tetanus, as well as the purest of official
preparations,  with  the  plainest  and  most  official-looking  labels on the swaggeringly modest brown bottles. Gottlieb had asserted that they
produced  doubtful  vaccines, yet he returned from Chicago to write to Dawson Hunziker that he was no longer interested in teaching, and he would
be willing to work for them on half time if he might use their laboratories, on possibly important research, for the rest of the day.

When  the  letter  had  gone  he  sat  mumbling.  He  was certainly not altogether sane. "Education! Biggest gymnasium in the world! Incapable of
responsibility.  Teaching  I  can  do no more. But Hunziker will laugh at me. I haf told the truth about him and I shall haf to-- Dear Gott, what
shall I do?"

Into this still frenzy, while his frightened daughters peered at him from doorways, hope glided.

The telephone rang. He did not answer it. On the third irascible burring he took up the receiver and grumbled, "Yes, yes, vot iss it?"

A twanging nonchalant voice: "This M. C. Gottlieb?"

"This is Dr. Gottlieb!"

"Well, I guess you're the party. Hola wire. Long distance wants yuh."

Then, "Professor Gottlieb? This is Dawson Hunziker speaking. From Pittsburgh. My dear fellow, we should be delighted to have you join our staff."

"I-- But--"

"I  believe  you have criticized the pharmaceutical houses--oh, we read the newspaper clippings very efficiently!--but we feel that when you come
to us and understand the Spirit of the Old Firm better, you'll be enthusiastic. I hope, by the way, I'm not interrupting something."

Thus,  over  certain  hundreds of miles, from the gold and blue drawing-room of his Sewickley home, Hunziker spoke to Max Gottlieb sitting in his
patched easy chair, and Gottlieb grated with a forlorn effort at dignity:

"No, it iss all right."

"Well--we shall be glad to offer you five thousand dollars a year, for a starter, and we shan't worry about the half-time arrangement. We'll give
you  all  the space and technicians and material you need, and you just go ahead and ignore us, and work out whatever seems important to you. Our
only request is that if you do find any serums which are of real value to the world, we shall have the privilege of manufacturing them, and if we
lose  money  on  'em, it doesn't matter. We like to make money, if we can do it honestly, but our chief purpose is to serve mankind. Of course if
the serums pay, we shall be only too delighted to give you a generous commission. Now about practical details--"


II


Gottlieb, the placidly virulent hater of religious rites, had a religious-seeming custom.

Often  he  knelt  by  his  bed  and  let  his  mind  run  free. It was very much like prayer, though certainly there was no formal invocation, no
consciousness  of a Supreme Being--other than Max Gottlieb. This night, as he knelt, with the wrinkles softening in his drawn face, he meditated,
"I  was  asinine  that  I  should ever scold the commercialists! This salesman fellow, he has his feet on the ground. How much more aut'entic the
worst counter-jumper than frightened professors! Fine dieners! Freedom! No teaching of imbeciles! Du Heiliger!"

But he had no contract with Dawson Hunziker.

In  the  medical  periodicals  the  Dawson Hunziker Company published full-page advertisements, most starchy and refined in type, announcing that
Professor Max Gottlieb, perhaps the most distinguished immunologist in the world, had joined their staff.

In his Chicago clinic, one Dr. Rouncefield chuckled, "That's what becomes of these super-highbrows. Pardon me if I seem to grin."

In the laboratories of Ehrlich and Roux, Bordet and Sir David Bruce, sorrowing men wailed, "How could old Max have gone over to that damned pill-
peddler? Why didn't he come to us? Oh, well, if he didn't want to-- Voila! He is dead."

In the village of Wheatsylvania, in North Dakota, a young doctor protested to his wife, "Of all the people in the world! I wouldn't have believed
it! Max Gottlieb falling for those crooks!"

"I don't care!" said his wife. "If he's gone into business he had some good reason for it. I told you, I'd leave you for--"

"Oh, well," sighingly, "give and forgive. I learned a lot from Gottlieb and I'm grateful for-- God, Leora, I wish HE hadn't gone wrong!"

And  Max  Gottlieb, with his three young and a pale, slow-moving wife, was arriving at the station in Pittsburgh, tugging a shabby wicker bag, an
immigrant  bundle,  and  a Bond Street dressing-case. From the train he had stared up at the valiant cliffs, down to the smoke-tinged splendor of
the  river, and his heart was young. Here was fiery enterprise, not the flat land and flat minds of Winnemac. At the station-entrance every dingy
taxicab seemed radiant to him, and he marched forth a conqueror.


III


In the Dawson Hunziker building, Gottlieb found such laboratories as he had never planned, and instead of student assistants he had an expert who
himself  had  taught  bacteriology,  as  well as three swift technicians, one of them German-trained. He was received with acclaim in the private
office  of  Hunziker,  which  was  remarkably like a minor cathedral. Hunziker was bald and business-like as to skull but tortoise-spectacled and
sentimental of eye. He stood up at his Jacobean desk, gave Gottlieb a Havana cigar, and told him that they had awaited him pantingly.

In the enormous staff dining-room Gottlieb found scores of competent young chemists and biologists who treated him with reverence. He liked them.
If  they  talked  too much of money--of how much this new tincture of cinchona ought to sell, and how soon their salaries would be increased--yet
they  were  free  of the careful pomposities of college instructors. As a youngster, the cap-tilted young Max had been a laughing man, and now in
gusty arguments his laughter came back.

His  wife  seemed  better;  his daughter Miriam found an excellent piano teacher; the boy Robert entered college that autumn; they had a spacious
though  decrepit house; the relief from the droning and the annually repeated, inevitable routine of the classroom was exhilarating; and Gottlieb
had never in his life worked so well. He was unconscious of everything outside of his laboratory and a few theaters and concert-halls.

Six  months passed before he realized that the young technical experts resented what he considered his jolly thrusts at their commercialism. They
were  tired of his mathematical enthusiasms and some of them viewed him as an old bore, muttered of him as a Jew. He was hurt, for he liked to be
merry  with  fellow  workers.  He  began  to ask questions and to explore the Hunziker building. He had seen nothing of it save his laboratory, a
corridor or two, the dining-room, and Hunziker's office.

However  abstracted  and impractical, Gottlieb would have made an excellent Sherlock Holmes--if anybody who would have made an excellent Sherlock
Holmes  would  have  been willing to be a detective. His mind burned through appearances to actuality. He discovered now that the Dawson Hunziker
Company  was quite all he had asserted in earlier days. They did make excellent antitoxins and ethical preparations, but they were also producing
a  new  "cancer  remedy"  manufactured  from  the orchid, pontifically recommended and possessing all the value of mud. And to various billboard-
advertising  beauty  companies they sold millions of bottles of a complexion-cream guaranteed to turn a Canadian Indian guide as lily-fair as the
angels. This treasure cost six cents a bottle to make and a dollar over the counter, and the name of Dawson Hunziker was never connected with it.

It  was at this time that Gottlieb succeeded in his masterwork after twenty years of seeking. He produced antitoxin in the test-tube, which meant
that  it would be possible to immunize against certain diseases without tediously making sera by the inoculation of animals. It was a revolution,
the revolution, in immunology . . . if he was right.

He  revealed  it  at  a dinner for which Hunziker had captured a general, a college president, and a pioneer aviator. It was an expansive dinner,
with  admirable hock, the first decent German wine Gottlieb had drunk in years. He twirled the slender green glass affectionately; he came out of
his  dreams  and  became  excited,  gay,  demanding. They applauded him, and for an hour he was a Great Scientist. Of them all, Hunziker was most
generous in his praise. Gottlieb wondered if someone had not tricked this good bald man into intrigues with the beautifiers.

Hunziker  summoned  him  to the office next day. Hunziker did his summoning very well indeed (unless it happened to be merely a stenographer). He
sent  a  glossy morning-coated male secretary, who presented Mr. Hunziker's compliments to the much less glossy Dr. Gottlieb, and hinted with the
delicacy  of  a lilac bud that if it was quite altogether convenient, if it would not in the least interfere with Dr. Gottlieb's experiments, Mr.
Hunziker would be flattered to see him in the office at a quarter after three.

When Gottlieb rambled in, Hunziker motioned the secretary out of existence and drew up a tall Spanish chair.

"I  lay  awake  half  the night thinking about your discovery, Dr. Gottlieb. I've been talking to the technical director and sales-manager and we
feel  it's  the  time  to strike. We'll patent your method of synthesizing antibodies and immediately put them on the market in large quantities,
with  a  great  big  advertising  campaign--you  know--not  circus it, of course--strictly high-class ethical advertising. We'll start with anti-
diphtheria serum. By the way, when you receive your next check you'll find we've raised your honorarium to seven thousand a year." Hunziker was a
large  purring  pussy  now,  and  Gottlieb  death-still.  "Need  I  say,  my  dear fellow, that if there's the demand I anticipate, you will have
exceedingly large commissions coming!"

Hunziker leaned back with a manner of "How's that for glory, my boy?"

Gottlieb  spoke  nervously:  "I  do  not  approve  of patenting serological processes. They should be open to all laboratories. And I am strongly
against premature production or even announcement. I think I am right, but I must check my technique, perhaps improve it--be SURE. Then, I should
think there should be no objection to market production, but in ve-ry small quantities and in fair competition with others, not under patents, as
if this was a dinglebat toy for the Christmas tradings!"

"My  dear  fellow,  I  quite  sympathize.  Personally  I  should  like  nothing so much as to spend my whole life in just producing one priceless
scientific  discovery,  without consideration of mere profit. But we have our duty toward the stockholders of the Dawson Hunziker Company to make
money  for them. Do you realize that they have--and many of them are poor widows and orphans--invested their Little All in our stock, and that we
must  keep  faith?  I am helpless; I am but their Humble Servant. And on the other side: I think we've treated you rather well, Dr. Gottlieb, and
we've  given  you complete freedom. And we intend to go on treating you well! Why, man, you'll be rich; you'll be one of us! I don't like to make
any demands, but on this point it's my duty to insist, and I shall expect you at the earliest possible moment to start manufacturing--"

Gottlieb was sixty-two. The defeat at Winnemac had done something to his courage. . . . And he had no contract with Hunziker.

He  protested  shakily,  but  as  he  crawled  back to his laboratory it seemed impossible for him to leave this sanctuary and face the murderous
brawling  world,  and  quite  as  impossible  to  tolerate  a cheapened and ineffective imitation of his antitoxin. He began, that hour, a sordid
strategy  which his old proud self would have called inconceivable; he began to equivocate, to put off announcement and production till he should
have  "cleared up a few points," while week on week Hunziker became more threatening. Meantime he prepared for disaster. He moved his family to a
smaller house, and gave up every luxury, even smoking.

Among his economies was the reduction of his son's allowance.

Robert  was  a  square-rigged, swart, tempestuous boy, arrogant where there seemed to be no reason for arrogance, longed for by the anemic, milky
sort  of  girls,  yet  ever supercilious to them. While his father was alternately proud and amiably sardonic about his own Jewish blood, the boy
conveyed  to  his  classmates in college that he was from pure and probably noble German stock. He was welcomed, or half welcomed, in a motoring,
poker-playing, country-club set, and he had to have more money. Gottlieb missed twenty dollars from his desk. He who ridiculed conventional honor
had the honor, as he had the pride, of a savage old squire. A new misery stained his incessant bitterness at having to deceive Hunziker. He faced
Robert with, "My boy, did you take the money from my desk?"

Few youngsters could have faced that jut of his hawk nose, the red-veined rage of his sunken eyes. Robert spluttered, then shouted:

"Yes,  I  did!  And  I've  got to have some more! I've got to get some clothes and stuff. It's your fault. You bring me up to train with a lot of
fellows that have all the cash in the world, and then you expect me to dress like a hobo!"

"Stealing--"

"Rats!  What's  stealing!  You're always making fun of these preachers that talk about Sin and Truth and Honesty and all those words that've been
used  so  much  they  don't  mean  a  darn'  thing  and--I  don't  care! Daws Hunziker, the old man's son, he told me his dad said you could be a
millionaire,  and  then  you  keep us strapped like this, and Mom sick-- Let me tell you, back in Mohalis Mom used to slip me a couple of dollars
almost every week and-- I'm tired of it! If you're going to keep me in rags, I'm going to cut out college!"

Gottlieb  stormed, but there was no force in it. He did not know, all the next fortnight, what his son was going to do, what himself was going to
do.

Then,  so  quietly  that  not  till they had returned from the cemetery did they realize her passing, his wife died, and the next week his oldest
daughter ran off with a worthless laughing fellow who lived by gambling.

Gottlieb  sat  alone.  Over  and  over he read the Book of Job. "Truly the Lord hath smitten me and my house," he whispered. When Robert came in,
mumbling  that he would be good, the old man lifted to him a blind face, unhearing. But as he repeated the fables of his fathers it did not occur
to him to believe them, or to stoop in fear before their God of Wrath--or to gain ease by permitting Hunziker to defile his discovery.

He  arose,  in  time, and went silently to his laboratory. His experiments were as careful as ever, and his assistants saw no change save that he
did not lunch in hall. He walked blocks away, to a vile restaurant at which he could save thirty cents a day.


IV


Out of the dimness which obscured the people about him, Miriam emerged.

She  was  eighteen,  the  youngest  of his brood, squat, and in no way comely save for her tender mouth. She had always been proud of her father,
understanding  the  mysterious  and  unreasoning  compulsions  of his science, but she had been in awe till now, when he walked heavily and spoke
rarely.  She  dropped her piano lessons, discharged the maid, studied the cook-book, and prepared for him the fat crisp dishes that he loved. Her
regret was that she had never learned German, for he dropped now and then into the speech of his boyhood.

He eyed her, and at length: "So! One is with me. Could you endure the poverty if I went away--to teach chemistry in a high school!"

"Yes. Of course. Maybe I could play the piano in a movie theater."

He might not have done it without her loyalty, but when Dawson Hunziker next paraded into the laboratory, demanding, "Now look here. We've fussed
long  enough.  We  got  to  put  your  stuff on the market," then Gottlieb answered, "No. If you wait till I have done all I can--maybe one year,
probably three--you shall have it. But not till I am sure. No."

Hunziker went off huffily, and Gottlieb prepared for sentence.

Then the card of Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs, Director of the McGurk Institute of Biology, of New York, was brought to him.

Gottlieb knew of Tubbs. He had never visited McGurk but he considered it, next to Rockefeller and McCormick, the soundest and freest organization
for  pure scientific research in the country, and if he had pictured a Heavenly laboratory in which good scientists might spend eternity in happy
and  thoroughly  impractical  research,  he  would have devised it in the likeness of McGurk. He was mildly pleased that its director should have
called on him.

Dr.  A. DeWitt Tubbs was tremendously whiskered on all visible spots save his nose and temples and the palms of his hands, short but passionately
whiskered,  like  a  Scotch  terrier. Yet they were not comic whiskers; they were the whiskers of dignity; and his eyes were serious, his step an
earnest trot, his voice a piping solemnity.

"Dr.  Gottlieb, this is a great pleasure. I have heard your papers at the Academy of Sciences but, to my own loss, I have hitherto failed to have
an introduction to you."

Gottlieb tried not to sound embarrassed.

Tubbs looked at the assistants; like a plotter in a political play, and hinted, "May we have a talk--"

Gottlieb led him to his office, overlooking a vast bustle of side-tracks, of curving rails and brown freight-cars, and Tubbs urged:

"It  has  come  to our attention, by a curious chance, that you are on the eve of your most significant discovery. We all wondered, when you left
academic work, at your decision to enter the commercial field. We wished that you had cared to come to us."

"You would have taken me in? I needn't at all have come here?"

"Naturally!  Now  from what we hear, you are not giving your attention to the commercial side of things, and that tempts us to wonder whether you
could be persuaded to join us at McGurk. So I just sprang on a train and ran down here. We should be delighted to have you become a member of the
institute, and chief of the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology. Mr. McGurk and I desire nothing but the advancement of science. You would,
of  course,  have  absolute  freedom  as  to  what  researches you thought it best to pursue, and I think we could provide as good assistance and
material  as  would be obtainable anywhere in the world. In regard to salary--permit me to be business-like and perhaps blunt, as my train leaves
in  one  hour--I  don't  suppose we could equal the doubtless large emolument which the Hunziker people are able to pay you, but we can go to ten
thousand dollars a year--"

"Oh, my God, do not talk of the money! I shall be wit' you in New York one week from today. You see," said Gottlieb, "I haf no contract here!"




Chapter 14



All  afternoon they drove in the flapping buggy across the long undulations of the prairie. To their wandering there was no barrier, neither lake
nor mountain nor factory-bristling city, and the breeze about them was flowing sunshine.

Martin  cried  to  Leora,  "I feel as if all the Zenith dust and hospital lint were washed out of my lungs. Dakota. Real man's country. Frontier.
Opportunity. America!"

From  the  thick  swale  the young prairie chickens rose. As he watched them sweep across the wheat, his sun-drowsed spirit was part of the great
land, and he was almost freed of the impatience with which he had started out from Wheatsylvania.

"If you're going driving, don't forget that supper is six o'clock sharp," Mrs. Tozer had said, smiling to sugar-coat it.

On Main Street, Mr. Tozer waved to them and shouted, "Be back by six. Supper at six o'clock sharp."

Bert  Tozer  ran  out  from  the  bank, like a country schoolmaster skipping from a one-room schoolhouse, and cackled, "Say, you folks better not
forget  to be back at six o'clock for supper or the Old Man'll have a fit. He'll expect you for supper at six o'clock sharp, and when he says six
o'clock SHARP, he means six o'clock SHARP, and not five minutes past six!"

"Now  that,"  observed Leora, "is funny, because in my twenty-two years in Wheatsylvania I remember three different times when supper was as late
as seven minutes after six. Let's get out of this, Sandy. . . . I wonder were we so wise to live with the family and save money?"

Before  they  had  escaped from the not very extensive limits of Wheatsylvania they passed Ada Quist, the future Mrs. Bert Tozer, and through the
lazy air they heard her voice slashing: "Better be home by six."

Martin would be heroic. "We'll by golly get back when we're by golly good and ready!" he said to Leora; but on them both was the cumulative dread
of  the  fussing  voices,  beyond every breezy prospect was the order, "Be back at six sharp"; and they whipped up to arrive at eleven minutes to
six, as Mr. Tozer was returning from the creamery, full thirty seconds later than usual.

"Glad to see you among us," he said. "Hustle now and get that horse in the livery stable. Supper's at six--sharp!"

Martin survived it sufficiently to sound domestic when he announced at the supper-table:

"We  had  a  bully drive. I'm going to like it here. Well, I've loafed for a day and a half, and now I've got to get busy. First thing is, I must
find a location for my office. What is there vacant, Father Tozer?"

Mrs.  Tozer  said  brightly, "Oh, I have such a nice idea, Martin. Why can't we fix up an office for you out in the barn? It'd be so handy to the
house,  for  you  to  get  to meals on time, and you could keep an eye on the house if the girl was out and Ory and I went out visiting or to the
Embroidery Circle."

"In the barn!"

"Why, yes, in the old harness room. It's partly ceiled, and we could put in some nice tar paper or even beaver board."

"Mother  Tozer, what the dickens do you think I'm planning to do? I'm not a hired man in a livery stable, or a kid looking for a place to put his
birds' eggs! I was thinking of opening an office as a physician!"

Bert made it all easy: "Yuh, but you aren't much of a physician yet. You're just getting your toes in."

"I'm  one  hell  of  a  good physician! Excuse me for cussing, Mother Tozer, but-- Why, nights in the hospital, I've held hundreds of lives in my
hand! I intend--"

"Look  here, Mart," said Bertie. "As we're putting up the money--I don't want to be a tightwad but after all, a dollar is a dollar--if we furnish
the dough, we've got to decide the best way to spend it."

Mr.  Tozer looked thoughtful and said helplessly, "That's so. No sense taking a risk, with the blame farmers demanding all the money they can get
for their wheat and cream, and then deliberately going to work and not paying the interest on their loans. I swear, it don't hardly pay to invest
in  mortgages  any longer. No sense putting on lugs. Stands to reason you can look at a fellow's sore throat or prescribe for an ear-ache just as
well  in  a nice simple little office as in some fool place all fixed up like a Moorhead saloon. Mother will see you have a comfortable corner in
the barn--"

Leora  intruded: "Look here, Papa. I want you to lend us one thousand dollars, outright, to use as we see fit." The sensation was immense. "We'll
pay you six per cent--no, we won't; we'll pay you five; that's enough."

"And mortgages bringing six, seven, and eight!" Bert quavered.

"Five's enough. And we want our own say, absolute, as to how we use it--to fit up an office or anything else."

Mr. Tozer began, "That's a foolish way to--"

Bert took it away from him: "Ory, you're crazy! I suppose we'll have to lend you some money, but you'll blame well come to us for it from time to
time, and you'll blame well take our advice--"

Leora  rose.  "Either you do what I say, just exactly what I say, or Mart and I take the first train and go back to Zenith, and I mean it! Plenty
of places open for him there, with a big salary, so we won't have to be dependent on anybody!"

There was much conversation, most of which sounded like all the rest of it. Once Leora started for the stairs, to go up and pack; once Martin and
she stood waving their napkins as they shook their fists, the general composition remarkably like the Laocoon.

Leora won.

They settled down to the most solacing fussing.

"Did you bring your trunk up from the depot?" asked Mr. Tozer.

"No sense leaving it there--paying two bits a day storage!" fumed Bert.

"I got it up this morning," said Martin.

"Oh, yes, Martin had it brought up this morning," agreed Mrs. Tozer.

"You had it brought? Didn't you bring it up yourself?" agonized Mr. Tozer.

"No. I had the fellow that runs the lumberyard haul it up for me," said Martin.

"Well, gosh almighty, you could just as well've put it on a wheelbarrow and brought it up yourself and saved a quarter!" said Bert.

"But a doctor has to keep his dignity," said Leora.

"Dignity, rats! Blame sight more dignified to be seen shoving a wheelbarrow than smoking them dirty cigarettes all the time!"

"Well, anyway-- Where'd you put it?" asked Mr. Tozer.

"It's up in our room," said Martin.

"Where'd you think we better put it when it's unpacked? The attic is awful' full," Mr. Tozer submitted to Mrs. Tozer.

"Oh, I think Martin could get it in there."

"Why couldn't he put it in the barn?"

"Oh, not a nice new trunk like that!"

"What's  the  matter  with  the barn?" said Bert. "It's all nice and dry. Seems a shame to waste all that good space in the barn, now that you've
gone and decided he mustn't have his dear little office there!"

"Bertie,"  from  Leora, "I know what we'll do. You seem to have the barn on your brain. You move your old bank there, and Martin'll take the bank
building for his office."

"That's entirely different--"

"Now there's no sense you two showing off and trying to be smart," protested Mr. Tozer. "Do you ever hear your mother and I scrapping and fussing
like  that? When do you think you'll have your trunk unpacked, Mart?" Mr. Tozer could consider barns and he could consider trunks but his was not
a brain to grasp two such complicated matters at the same time.

"I can get it unpacked tonight, if it makes any difference--"

"Well, I don't suppose it really makes any special difference, but when you start to DO a thing--"

"Oh, what difference does it make whether he--"

"If he's going to look for an office, instead of moving right into the barn, he can't take a month of Sundays getting unpacked and--"

"Oh, good Lord, I'll get it done tonight--"

"And I think we can get it in the attic--"

"I tell you it's jam full already--"

"We'll go take a look at it after supper--"

"Well now, I tell you when I tried to get that duck-boat in--"

Martin probably did not scream, but he heard himself screaming. The free and virile land was leagues away and for years forgotten.


II


To  find  an  office  took a fortnight of diplomacy, and of discussion brightening three meals a day, every day. (Not that office-finding was the
only  thing  the  Tozers mentioned. They went thoroughly into every moment of Martin's day; they commented on his digestion, his mail, his walks,
his shoes that needed cobbling, and whether he had yet taken them to the farmer-trapper-cobbler, and how much the cobbling ought to cost, and the
presumable theology, politics, and marital relations of the cobbler.)

Mr.  Tozer  had  from the first known the perfect office. The Norbloms lived above their general store, and Mr. Tozer knew that the Norbloms were
thinking  of  moving.  There was indeed nothing that was happening or likely to happen in Wheatsylvania which Mr. Tozer did not know and explain.
Mrs.  Norblom was tired of keeping house, and she wanted to go to Mrs. Beeson's boarding house (to the front room, on the right as you went along
the  up-stairs  hall,  the  room  with  the  plaster walls and the nice little stove that Mrs. Beeson bought from Otto Krag for seven dollars and
thirty-five cents--no, seven and a quarter it was).

They called on the Norbloms and Mr. Tozer hinted that "it might be nice for the Doctor to locate over the store, if the Norbloms were thinking of
making any change--"

The  Norbloms stared at each other, with long, bleached, cautious, Scandinavian stares, and grumbled that they "didn't KNOW--of course it was the
finest  location  in  town--" Mr. Norblom admitted that if, against all probability, they ever considered moving, they would probably ask twenty-
five dollars a month for the flat, unfurnished.

Mr. Tozer came out of the international conference as craftily joyful as any Mr. Secretary Tozer or Lord Tozer in Washington or London:

"Fine!  Fine!  We made him commit himself! Twenty-five, he says. That means, when the time's ripe, we'll offer him eighteen and close for twenty-
one-seventy-five.  If we just handle him careful, and give him time to go see Mrs. Beeson and fix up about boarding with her, we'll have him just
where we want him!"

"Oh,  if  the Norbloms can't make up their minds, then let's try something else," said Martin. "There's a couple of vacant rooms behind the Eagle
office."

"What?  Go  chasing  around,  after we've given the Norbloms reason to think we're serious, and make enemies of 'em for life? Now that would be a
fine  way to start building up a practice, wouldn't it? And I must say I wouldn't blame the Norbloms one bit for getting wild if you let 'em down
like that. This ain't Zenith, where you can go yelling around expecting to get things done in two minutes!"

Through  a  fortnight, while the Norbloms agonized over deciding to do what they had long ago decided to do, Martin waited, unable to begin work.
Until he should open a certified and recognizable office, most of the village did not regard him as a competent physician but as "that son-in-law
of Andy Tozer's." In the fortnight he was called only once: for the sick-headache of Miss Agnes Ingleblad, aunt and housekeeper of Alec Ingleblad
the barber. He was delighted, till Bert Tozer explained:

"Oh,  so  SHE  called  you in, eh? She's always doctorin' around. There ain't a thing the matter with her, but she's always trying out the latest
stunt.  Last  time  it  was  a  fellow that come through here selling pills and liniments out of a Ford, and the time before that it was a faith-
healer,  crazy loon up here at Dutchman's Forge, and then for quite a spell she doctored with an osteopath in Leopolis--though I tell you there's
something  to  this osteopathy--they cure a lot of folks that you regular docs can't seem to find out what's the matter with 'em, don't you think
so?"

Martin remarked that he did not think so.

"Oh, you docs!" Bert crowed in his most jocund manner, for Bert could be very joky and bright. "You're all alike, especially when you're just out
of  school  and think you know it all. You can't see any good in chiropractic or electric belts or bone-setters or anything, because they take so
many good dollars away from you."

Then  behold  the  Dr. Martin Arrowsmith who had once infuriated Angus Duer and Irving Watters by his sarcasm on medical standards upholding to a
lewdly  grinning  Bert  Tozer  the  benevolence  and  scientific knowledge of all doctors; proclaiming that no medicine had ever (at least by any
Winnemac graduate) been prescribed in vain nor any operation needlessly performed.

He  saw  a  good deal of Bert now. He sat about the bank, hoping to be called on a case, his fingers itching for bandages. Ada Quist came in with
frequency and Bert laid aside his figuring to be coy with her:

"You got to be careful what you even think about, when the doc is here, Ade. He's been telling me what a whale of a lot of neurology and all that
mind-reading stuff he knows. How about it, Mart? I'm getting so scared that I've changed the combination on the safe."

"Heh!"  said  Ada.  "He may fool some folks but he can't fool me. Anybody can learn things in books, but when it comes to practicing 'em-- Let me
tell you, Mart, if you ever have one-tenth of the savvy that old Dr. Winter of Leopolis has, you'll live longer than I expect!"

Together  they pointed out that for a person who felt his Zenith training had made him so "gosh-awful smart that he sticks up his nose at us poor
hicks of dirt-farmers," Martin's scarf was rather badly tied.

All of his own wit and some of Ada's Bert repeated at the supper table.

"You  oughtn't  to  ride the boy so hard. Still, that was pretty cute about the necktie--I guess Mart does think he's some punkins," chuckled Mr.
Tozer.

Leora took Martin aside after supper. "Darlin', can you stand it? We'll have our own house, soon as we can. Or shall we vamoose?"

"I'm by golly going to stand it!"

"Um. Maybe. Dear, when you hit Bertie, do be careful--they'll hang you."

He  ambled  to the front porch. He determined to view the rooms behind the Eagle office. Without a retreat in which to be safe from Bert he could
not endure another week. He could not wait for the Norbloms to make up their minds, though they had become to him dread and eternal figures whose
enmity would crush him; prodigious gods shadowing this Wheatsylvania which was the only perceptible world.

He  was  aware,  in  the  late sad light, that a man was tramping the plank walk before the house, hesitating and peering at him. The man was one
Wise,  a  Russian  Jew  known  to  the village as "Wise the Polack." In his shack near the railroad he sold silver stock and motor-factory stock,
bought and sold farmlands and horses and muskrat hides. He called out, "That you, Doc?"

"Yup!"

Martin was excited. A patient!

"Say,  I  wish  you'd walk down a ways with me. Couple things I'd like to talk to you about. Or say, come on over to my place and sample some new
cigars I've got." He emphasized the word "cigars." North Dakota was, like Mohalis, theoretically dry.

Martin was pleased. He had been sober and industrious so long now!

Wise's  shack  was a one-story structure, not badly built, half a block from Main Street, with nothing but the railroad track between it and open
wheat  country.  It  was lined with pine, pleasant-smelling under the stench of old pipe-smoke. Wise winked--he was a confidential, untrustworthy
wisp of a man--and murmured, "Think you could stand a little jolt of first-class Kentucky bourbon?"

"Well, I wouldn't get violent about it."

Wise pulled down the sleazy window-shades and from a warped drawer of his desk brought up a bottle out of which they both drank, wiping the mouth
of the bottle with circling palms. Then Wise, abruptly:

"Look here, Doc. You're not like these hicks; you understand that sometimes a fellow gets mixed up in crooked business he didn't intend to. Well,
make  a  long  story  short,  I guess I've sold too much mining stock, and they'll be coming down on me. I've got to be moving--curse it--hoped I
could  stay settled for couple of years, this time. Well, I hear you're looking for an office. This place would be ideal. Ideal! Two rooms at the
back  besides  this  one.  I'll rent it to you, furniture and the whole shooting-match, for fifteen dollars a month, if you'll pay me one year in
advance. Oh, this ain't phony. Your brother-in-law knows all about my ownership."

Martin  tried  to  be  very  business-like.  Was he not a young doctor who would soon be investing money, one of the most Substantial Citizens in
Wheatsylvania?  He  returned  home,  and  under the parlor lamp, with its green daisies on pink glass, the Tozers listened acutely, Bert stooping
forward with open mouth.

"You'd be safe renting it for a year, but that ain't the point," said Bert.

"It  certainly isn't! Antagonize the Norbloms, now that they've almost made up their minds to let you have their place? Make me a fool, after all
the trouble I've taken?" groaned Mr. Tozer.

They went over it and over it till almost ten o'clock, but Martin was resolute, and the next day he rented Wise's shack.

For the first time in his life he had a place utterly his own, his and Leora's.

In his pride of possession this was the most lordly building on earth, and every rock and weed and doorknob was peculiar and lovely. At sunset he
sat  on  the  back stoop (a very interesting and not too broken soap-box) and from the flamboyant horizon the open country flowed across the thin
band of the railroad to his feet. Suddenly Leora was beside him, her arm round his neck, and he hymned all the glory of their future:

"Know what I found in the kitchen here? A dandy old auger, hardly rusty a bit, and I can take a box and make a test-tube rack . . . of my own!"




Chapter 15



With none of the profane observations on "medical peddlers" which had annoyed Digamma Pi, Martin studied the catalogue of the New Idea Instrument
and Furniture Company, of Jersey City. It was a handsome thing. On the glossy green cover, in red and black, were the portraits of the president,
a round quippish man who loved all young physicians; the general manager, a cadaverous scholarly man who surely gave all his laborious nights and
days  to the advancement of science; and the vice-president, Martin's former preceptor, Dr. Roscoe Geake, who had a lively, eye-glassed, forward-
looking modernity all his own. The cover also contained in surprisingly small space, a quantity of poetic prose, and the inspiring promise:


Doctor,  don't be buffaloed by the unenterprising. No reason why YOU should lack the equipment which impresses patients, makes practice easy, and
brings  honor  and  riches. All the high-class supplies which distinguish the Leaders of the Profession from the Dubs are within YOUR reach right
NOW  by  the famous New Idea Financial System: "Just a little down and the rest FREE--out of the increased earnings which New Idea apparatus will
bring you!"


Above, in a border of laurel wreaths and Ionic capitals, was the challenge:


Sing  not  the glory of soldiers or explorers or statesmen for who can touch the doctor--wise, heroic, uncontaminated by common greed. Gentlemen,
we salute you humbly and herewith offer you the most up-to-the-jiffy catalogue ever presented by any surgical supply house.


The  back cover, though it was less glorious with green and red, was equally arousing. It presented illustrations of the Bindledorf Tonsillectomy
Outfit and of an electric cabinet, with the demand:


Doctor,  are  you  sending  your  patients off to specialists for tonsil removal or to sanitoriums for electric, etc., treatment? If, so, you are
losing the chance to show yourself one of the distinguished powers in the domain of medical advancement in your locality, and losing a lot of big
fees. Don't you WANT to be a high-class practitioner? Here's the Open Door.

The  Bindledorf  Outfit is not only useful but exquisitely beautiful, adorns and gives class to any office. We guarantee that by the installation
of  a  Bindledorf Outfit and a New Idea Panaceatic Electro-Therapeutic Cabinet (see details on pp. 34 and 97) you can increase your income from a
thousand to ten thousand annually and please patients more than by the most painstaking plugging.

When  the  Great Call sounds, Doctor, and it's time for you to face your reward, will you be satisfied by a big Masonic funeral and tributes from
Grateful Patients if you have failed to lay up provision for the kiddies, and faithful wife who has shared your tribulations?

You  may  drive through blizzard and August heat, and go down into the purple-shadowed vale of sorrow and wrestle with the ebon-cloaked Powers of
Darkness  for  the  lives  of  your  patients,  but that heroism is incomplete without Modern Progress, to be obtained by the use of a Bindledorf
Tonsillectomy  Outfit  and  the  New  Idea  Panaceatic  Cabinet,  to be obtained on small payment down, rest on easiest terms known in history of
medicine!


II


This  poetry  of  passion Martin neglected, for his opinion of poetry was like his opinion of electric cabinets, but excitedly he ordered a steel
stand,  a  sterilizer,  flasks,  test-tubes, and a white-enameled mechanism with enchanting levers and gears which transformed it from examining-
chair to operating-table. He yearned over the picture of a centrifuge while Leora was admiring the "stunning seven-piece Reception Room fumed oak
set,  upholstered  in  genuine  Barcelona  Longware  Leatherette,  will  give  your  office  the class and distinction of any high-grade New York
specialist's."

"Aw, let 'em sit on plain chairs," Martin grunted.

In  the  attic  Mrs.  Tozer  found  enough  seedy chairs for the reception-room, and an ancient bookcase which, when Leora had lined it with pink
fringed  paper,  became a noble instrument-cabinet. Till the examining-chair should arrive, Martin would use Wise's lumpy couch, and Leora busily
covered  it  with  white oilcloth. Behind the front room of the tiny office-building were two cubicles, formerly bedroom and kitchen. Martin made
them  into  consultation-room  and  laboratory. Whistling, he sawed out racks for the glassware and turned the oven of a discarded kerosene stove
into a hot-air oven for sterilizing glassware.

"But understand, Lee, I'm not going to go monkeying with any scientific research. I'm through with all that."

Leora  smiled  innocently.  While  he worked she sat outside in the long wild grass, sniffing the prairie breeze, her hands about her ankles, but
every quarter-hour she had to come in and admire.

Mr.  Tozer  brought home a package at suppertime. The family opened it, babbling. After supper Martin and Leora hastened with the new treasure to
the  office  and  nailed  it  in  place. It was a plate-glass sign; on it in gold letters, "M. Arrowsinith, M.D." They looked up, arms about each
other, squealing softly, and in reverence he grunted, "There--by--jiminy!"

They  sat  on  the  back  stoop, exulting in freedom from Tozers. Along the railroad bumped a freight train with a cheerful clanking. The fireman
waved  to  them  from  the  engine, a brakeman from the platform of the red caboose. After the train there was silence but for the crickets and a
distant frog.

"I've never been so happy," he murmured.


III


He had brought from Zenith his own Ochsner surgical case. As he laid out the instruments he admired the thin, sharp, shining bistoury, the strong
tenotome,  the  delicate curved needles. With them was a dental forceps. Dad Silva had warned his classes, "Don't forget the country doctor often
has  to  be  not  only physician but dentist, yes, and priest, divorce lawyer, blacksmith, chauffeur, and road engineer, and if you are too lily-
handed  for those trades, don't get out of sight of a trolley line and a beauty parlor." And the first patient whom Martin had in the new office,
the second patient in Wheatsylvania, was Nils Krag, the carpenter, roaring with an ulcerated tooth. This was a week before the glass sign was up,
and Martin rejoiced to Leora, "Begun already! You'll see 'em tumbling in now."

They  did  not  see  them  tumbling in. For ten days Martin tinkered at his hot-air oven or sat at his desk, reading and trying to look busy. His
first joy passed into fretfulness, and he could have yelped at the stillness, the inactivity.

Late one afternoon, when he was in a melancholy way preparing to go home, into the office stamped a grizzled Swedish farmer who grumbled, "Doc, I
got  a  fish-hook  caught  in  my thumb and its all swole." To Arrowsmith, intern in Zenith General Hospital with its out-patient clinic treating
hundreds  a  day,  the  dressing of a hand had been less important than borrowing a match, but to Dr. Arrowsmith of Wheatsylvania it was a hectic
operation,  and the farmer a person remarkable and very charming. Martin shook his left hand violently and burbled, "Now if there's anything, you
just 'phone me--you just 'phone me."

There had been, he felt, a rush of admiring patients sufficient to justify them in the one thing Leora and he longed to do, the thing about which
they whispered at night: the purchase of a motor car for his country calls.

They had seen the car at Frazier's store.

It  was  a Ford, five years old, with torn upholstery, a gummy motor, and springs made by a blacksmith who had never made springs before. Next to
the chugging of the gas engine at the creamery, the most familiar sound in Wheatsylvania was Frazier's closing the door of his Ford. He banged it
flatly at the store, and usually he had to shut it thrice again before he reached home.

But to Martin and Leora, when they had tremblingly bought the car and three new tires and a horn, it was the most impressive vehicle on earth. It
was their own; they could go when and where they wished.

During his summer at a Canadian hotel Martin had learned to drive the Ford station wagon, but it was Leora's first venture. Bert had given her so
many  directions  that  she  had refused to drive the family Overland. When she first sat at the steering wheel, when she moved the hand-throttle
with her little finger and felt in her own hands all this power, sorcery enabling her to go as fast as she might desire (within distinct limits),
she transcended human strength, she felt that she could fly like the wild goose--and then in a stretch of sand she killed the engine.

Martin  became  the demon driver of the village. To ride with him was to sit holding your hat, your eyes closed, waiting for death. Apparently he
accelerated  for  corners, to make them more interesting. The sight of anything on the road ahead, from another motor to a yellow pup, stirred in
him  a  frenzy  which could be stilled only by going up and passing it. The village adored, "The Young Doc is quite some driver, all right." They
waited,  with amiable interest, to hear that he had been killed. It is possible that half of the first dozen patients who drifted into his office
came  because  of  awe  at  his  driving  .  .  .  the rest because there was nothing serious the matter, and he was nearer than Dr. Hesselink at
Groningen.


IV


With his first admirers he developed his first enemies.

When  he met the Norbloms on the street (and in Wheatsylvania it is difficult not to meet everyone on the street every day), they glared. Then he
antagonized Pete Yeska.

Pete conducted what he called a "drug store," devoted to the sale of candy, soda water, patent medicines, fly paper, magazines, washing-machines,
and  Ford  accessories,  yet  Pete  would have starved if he had not been postmaster also. He alleged that he was a licensed pharmacist but he so
mangled prescriptions that Martin burst into the store and addressed him piously.

"You  young  docs  make  me  sick,"  said Pete. "I was putting up prescriptions when you was in the cradle. The old doc that used to be here sent
everything to me. My way o' doing things suits me, and I don't figure on changing it for you or any other half-baked young string-bean."

Thereafter  Martin  had  to  purchase  drugs from St. Paul, over-crowd his tiny laboratory, and prepare his own pills and ointments, looking in a
homesick  way at the rarely used test-tubes and the dust gathering on the bell glass of his microscope, while Pete Yeska joined with the Norbloms
in Whispering, "This new doc here ain't any good. You better stick to Hesselink."


V


So  blank, so idle, had been the week that when he heard the telephone at the Tozers', at three in the morning, he rushed to it as though he were
awaiting a love message.

A hoarse and shaky voice: "I want to speak to the doctor."

"Yuh--yuh-- 'S the doctor speaking."

"This is Henry Novak, four miles northeast, on the Leopolis road. My little girl, Mary, she has a terrible sore throat. I think maybe it is croup
and she look awful and-- Could you come right away?"

"You bet. Be right there."

Four miles--he would do it in eight minutes.

He dressed swiftly, dragging his worn brown tie together, while Leora beamed over the first night call. He furiously cranked the Ford, banged and
clattered  past  the  station and into the wheat prairie. When he had gone six miles by the speedometer, slackening at each rural box to look for
the  owner's  name,  he  realized  that he was lost. He ran into a farm driveway and stopped under the willows, his headlight on a heap of dented
milk-cans,  broken harvester wheels, cord-wood, and bamboo fishing-poles. From the barn dashed a woolly anomalous dog, barking viciously, leaping
up at the car.

A frowsy head protruded from a ground-floor window. "What you want?" screamed a Scandinavian voice.

"This is The Doctor. Where does Henry Novak live?"

"Oh! The Doctor! Dr. Hesselink?"

"No! Dr. Arrowsmith."

"Oh. Dr. Arrowsmith. From Wheatsylvania? Um. Well, you went right near his place. You yoost turn back one mile and turn to the right by the brick
schoolhouse, and it's about forty rods up the road--the house with a cement silo. Somebody sick by Henry's?"

"Yuh--yuh--girl's got croup--thanks--"

"Yoost keep to the right. You can't miss it." Probably no one who has listened to the dire "you can't miss it" has ever failed to miss it.

Martin  swung  the  Ford about, grazing a slashed chopping block; he rattled up the road, took the corner that side of the schoolhouse instead of
this,  ran half a mile along a boggy trail between pastures, and stopped at a farmhouse. In the surprising fall of silence, cows were to be heard
feeding,  and  a  white horse, startled in the darkness, raised its head to wonder at him. He had to arouse the house with wild squawkings of his
horn, and an irate farmer who bellowed, "Who's there? I've got a shotgun!" sent him back to the country road.

It  was forty minutes from the time of the telephone call when he rushed into a furrowed driveway and saw on the doorstep, against the lamplight,
a stooped man who called, "The Doctor? This is Novak."

He  found the child in a newly finished bedroom of white plastered walls and pale varnished pine. Only an iron bed, a straight chair, a chromo of
St.  Anne,  and  a  shadeless  hand-lamp  on a rickety stand broke the staring shininess of the apartment, a recent extension of the farmhouse. A
heavy-shouldered woman was kneeling by the bed. As she lifted her wet red face, Novak urged:

"Don't  cry  now;  he's here!" And to Martin: "The little one is pretty bad but we done all we could for her. Last night and tonight we steam her
throat, and we put her here in our own bedroom!"

Mary  was  a child of seven or eight. Martin found her lips and finger-tips blue, but in her face no flush. In the effort to expel her breath she
writhed into terrifying knots, then coughed up saliva dotted with grayish specks. Martin worried as he took out his clinical thermometer and gave
it a professional-looking shake.

It  was,  he decided, laryngeal croup or diphtheria. Probably diphtheria. No time now for bacteriological examination, for cultures and leisurely
precision.  Silva  the  healer bulked in the room, crowding out Gottlieb the inhuman perfectionist. Martin leaned nervously over the child on the
tousled  bed,  absentmindedly  trying  her  pulse again and again. He felt helpless without the equipment of Zenith General, its nurses and Angus
Duers sure advice. He had a sudden respect for the lone country doctor.

He  had  to  make  a  decision,  irrevocable, perhaps perilous. He would use diphtheria antitoxin. But certainly he could not obtain it from Pete
Yeska's in Wheatsylvania.

Leopolis?

"Hustle  up and get me Blassner, the druggist at Leopolis, on the 'phone," he said to Novak, as calmly as he could contrive. He pictured Blassner
driving  through  the  night, respectfully bringing the antitoxin to The Doctor. While Novak bellowed into the farm-line telephone in the dining-
room,  Martin  waited--waited--staring  at  the  child;  Mrs.  Novak waited for him to do miracles; the child's tossing and hoarse gasping became
horrible; and the glaring walls, the glaring lines of pale yellow woodwork, hypnotized him into sleepiness. It was too late for anything short of
antitoxin  or  tracheotomy.  Should he operate; cut into the wind-pipe that she might breathe? He stood and worried; he drowned in sleepiness and
shook himself awake. He had to do something, with the mother kneeling there, gaping at him, beginning to look doubtful.

"Get some hot cloths--towels, napkins--and keep 'em around her neck. I wish to God he'd get that telephone call!" he fretted.

As  Mrs.  Novak,  padding on thick slippered feet, brought in the hot cloths, Novak appeared with a blank "Nobody sleeping at the drug store, and
Blassner's house-line is out of order."

"Then  listen.  I'm  afraid  this  may  be  serious.  I've  got  to  have antitoxin. Going to drive t' Leopolis and get it. You keep up these hot
applications  and--  Wish  we  had  an  atomizer.  And room ought to be moister. Got 'n alcohol stove? Keep some water boiling in here. No use of
medicine. B' right back."

He  drove  the twenty-four miles to Leopolis in thirty-seven minutes. Not once did he slow down for a cross-road. He defied the curves, the roots
thrusting  out into the road, though always one dark spot in his mind feared a blow-out and a swerve. The speed, the casting away of all caution,
wrought  in him a high exultation, and it was blessed to be in the cool air and alone, after the strain of Mrs. Novak's watching. In his mind all
the  while was the page in Osler regarding diphtheria, the very picture of the words: "In severe cases the first dose should be from 8,000--" No.
Oh, yes: "--from 10,000 to 15,000 units."

He regained confidence. He thanked the god of science for antitoxin and for the gas motor. It was, he decided, a Race with Death.

"I'm going to do it--going to pull it off and save that poor kid!" he rejoiced.

He  approached  a  grade  crossing  and hurled toward it, ignoring possible trains. He was aware of a devouring whistle, saw sliding light on the
rails,  and brought up sharp. Past him, ten feet from his front wheels, flung the Seattle Express like a flying volcano. The fireman was stoking,
and  even  in  the  thin  clearness of coming dawn the glow from the fire-box was appalling on the under side of the rolling smoke. Instantly the
apparition  was  gone and Martin sat trembling, hands trembling on the little steering-wheel, foot trembling like St. Vitus's dance on the brake.
"That was an awful' close thing!" he muttered, and thought of a widowed Leora, abandoned to Tozers. But the vision of the Novak child, struggling
for  each  terrible  breath, overrode all else. "Hell! I've killed the engine!" he groaned. He vaulted over the side, cranked the car, and dashed
into Leopolis.

To  Crynssen  County,  Leopolis with its four thousand people was a metropolis, but in the pinched stillness of the dawn it was a tiny graveyard:
Main  Street  a  sandy expanse, the low shops desolate as huts. He found one place astir; in the bleak office of the Dakota Hotel the night clerk
was playing poker with the 'bus-driver and the town policeman.

They wondered at his hysterical entrance.

"Dr. Arrowsmith, from Wheatsylvania. Kid dying from diphtheria. Where's Blassner live? Jump in my car and show me."

The  constable was a lanky old man, his vest swinging open over a collarless shirt, his trousers in folds, his eyes resolute. He guided Martin to
the  home  of the druggist, he kicked the door, then, standing with his lean and bristly visage upraised in the cold early light, he bawled, "Ed!
Hey, you, Ed! Come out of it!"

Ed  Blassner  grumbled  from the up-stairs window. To him, death and furious doctors had small novelty. While he drew on his trousers and coat he
was  to be heard discoursing to his drowsy wife on the woe of druggists and the desirability of moving to Los Angeles and going into real estate.
But he did have diphtheria antitoxin in his shop, and sixteen minutes after Martin's escape from being killed by a train he was speeding to Henry
Novak's.


VI


The child was still alive when he came brusquely into the house

All  the  way back he had seen her dead and stiff. He grunted "Thank God!" and angrily called for hot water. He was no longer the embarrassed cub
doctor but the wise and heroic physician who had won the Race with Death, and in the Peasant eyes of Mrs. Novak, in Henry's nervous obedience, he
read his power.

Swiftly, smoothly, he made intravenous injection of the antitoxin, and stood expectant.

The child's breathing did not at first vary, as she choked in the labor of expelling her breath. There was a gurgle, a struggle in which her face
blackened,  and  she  was  still.  Martin peered, incredulous. Slowly the Novaks began to glower, shaky hands at their lips. Slowly they knew the
child was gone.

In  the  hospital,  death  had  become  indifferent  and  natural  to Martin. He had said to Angus, he had heard nurses say one to another, quite
cheerfully, "Well, fifty-seven has just passed out." Now he raged with desire to do the impossible. She COULDN'T be dead. He'd do something-- All
the while he was groaning, "I should've operated--I should have." So insistent was the thought that for a time he did not realize that Mrs. Novak
was clamoring, "She is dead? Dead?"

He nodded, afraid to look at the woman.

"You killed her, with that needle thing! And not even tell us, so we could call the priest!"

He crawled past her lamentations and the man's sorrow and drove home, empty of heart.

"I shall never practice medicine again," he reflected.

"I'm through," he said to Leora. "I'm no good. I should of operated. I can't face people, when they know about it. I'm through. I'll go get a lab
job--Dawson Hunziker or some place."

Salutary was the tartness with which she protested, "You're the most conceited man that ever lived! Do you think you're the only doctor that ever
lost  a  patient?  I know you did everything you could." But he went about next day torturing himself, the more tortured when Mr. Tozer whined at
supper, "Henry Novak and his woman was in town today. They say you ought to have saved their girl. Why didn't you give your mind to it and manage
to cure her somehow? Ought to tried. Kind of too bad, because the Novaks have a lot of influence with all these Pole and Hunky farmers."

After a night when he was too tired to sleep, Martin suddenly drove to Leopolis.

From  the  Tozers he had heard almost religious praise of Dr. Adam Winter of Leopolis, a man of nearly seventy, the pioneer physician of Crynssen
County,  and  to  this  sage he was fleeing. As he drove he mocked furiously his melodramatic Race with Death, and he came wearily into the dust-
whirling Main Street. Dr. Winter's office was above a grocery, in a long "block" of bright red brick stores with an Egyptian cornice--of tin. The
darkness  of  the broad hallway was soothing after the prairie heat and incandescence. Martin had to wait till three respectful patients had been
received by Dr. Winter, a hoary man with a sympathetic bass voice, before he was admitted to the consultation-room.

The  examining-chair  was of doubtful superiority to that once used by Doc Vickerson of Elk Mills, and sterilizing was apparently done in a wash-
bowl, but in a corner was an electric therapeutic cabinet with more electrodes and pads than Martin had ever seen.

He  told  the story of the Novaks, and Winter cried, "Why, Doctor, you did everything you could have and more too. Only thing is, next time, in a
crucial case, you better call some older doctor in consultation--not that you need his advice, but it makes a hit with the family, it divides the
responsibility, and keeps 'em from going around criticizing. I, uh, I frequently have the honor of being called by some of my younger colleagues.
Just wait. I'll 'phone the editor of the Gazette and give him an item about the case."

When he had telephoned, Dr. Winter shook hands ardently. He indicated his electric cabinet. "Got one of those things yet? Ought to, my boy. Don't
know  as  I  use it very often, except with the cranks that haven't anything the matter with 'em, but say, it would surprise you how it impresses
folks.  Well, Doctor, welcome to Crynssen County. Married? Won't you and your wife come take dinner with us some Sunday noon? Mrs. Winter will be
real  pleased to meet you. And if I ever can be of service to you in a consultation--I only charge a very little more than my regular fee, and it
looks so well, talking the case over with an older man."

Driving home, Martin fell into vain and wicked boasting:

"You bet I'll stick to it! At worst, I'll never be as bad as that snuffling old fee-splitter!"

Two weeks after, the Wheatsylvania Eagle, a smeary four-page rag, reported:


Our  enterprising  contemporary,  the  Leopolis  Gazette,  had as follows last week to say of one of our townsmen who we recently welcomed to our
midst.

"Dr.  M.  Arrowsmith  of  Wheatsylvania  is  being  congratulated, we are informed by our valued pioneer local physician, Dr. Adam Winter, by the
medical  fraternity  all  through  the  Pony  River Valley, there being no occupation or profession more unselfishly appreciative of each other's
virtues than the medical gentlemen, on the courage and enterprise he recently displayed in addition to his scientific skill.

"Being  called  to  attend  the  little  daughter of Henry Norwalk of near Delft the well-known farmer and finding the little one near death with
diphtheria  he  made a desperate attempt to save it by himself bringing antitoxin from Blassner our ever popular druggist, who had on hand a full
and fresh supply. He drove out and back in his gasoline chariot, making the total distance of 48 miles in 79 minutes.

Fortunately  our  ever  alert policeman, Joe Colby, was on the job and helped Dr. Arrowsmith find Mr. Blassner's bungalow on Red River Avenue and
this  gentleman  rose  from  bed  and hastened to supply the doctor with the needed article but unfortunately the child was already too low to be
saved  but  it  is  by  such  incidents  of  pluck  and quick thinking as well as knowledge which make the medical profession one of our greatest
blessings."


Two  hours  after  this was published, Miss Agnes Ingleblad came in for another discussion of her non-existent ailments, and two days later Henry
Novak appeared, saying proudly:

"Well,  Doc, we all done what we could for the poor little girl, but I guess I waited too long calling you. The woman is awful' cut up. She and I
was  reading  that  piece  in  the  Eagle  about  it.  We showed it to the priest. Say, Doc, I wish you'd take a look at my foot. I got kind of a
rheumatic pain in the ankle."




Chapter 16



When he had practiced medicine in Wheatsylvania for one year, Martin was an inconspicuous but not discouraged country doctor. In summer Leora and
he  drove  to  the  Pony  River for picnic suppers and a swim, very noisy, splashing, and immodest; through autumn he went duck-hunting with Bert
Tozer,  who  became  nearly  tolerable  when he stood at sunset on a pass between two slews; and with winter isolating the village in a sun-blank
desert of snow, they had sleigh-rides, card-parties, "sociables" at the churches.

When  Martin's  flock  turned  to him for help, their need and their patient obedience made them beautiful. Once or twice he lost his temper with
jovial  villagers who bountifully explained to him that he was less aged than he might have been; once or twice he drank too much whisky at poker
parties  in  the  back  room  of  the Co-operative Store; but he was known as reliable, skillful, and honest--and on the whole he was rather less
distinguished  than  Alec  Ingleblad  the  barber,  less  prosperous than Nils Krag the carpenter, and less interesting to his neighbors than the
Finnish garageman.

Then one accident and one mistake made him famous for full twelve miles about.

He  had  gone fishing, in the spring. As he passed a farmhouse a woman ran out shrieking that her baby had swallowed a thimble and was choking to
death. Martin had for surgical kit a large jack-knife. He sharpened it on the farmer's oilstone, sterilized it in the tea-kettle, operated on the
baby's throat, and saved its life.

Every  newspaper  in  the Pony River Valley had a paragraph, and before this sensation was over he cured Miss Agnes Ingleblad of her desire to be
cured.

She  had  achieved  cold  hands  and  a slow circulation, and he was called at midnight. He was soggily sleepy, after two country drives on muddy
roads, and in his torpor he gave her an overdose of strychnin, which so shocked and stimulated her that she decided to be well. It was so violent
a  change  that  it made her more interesting than being an invalid--people had of late taken remarkably small pleasure in her symptoms. She went
about  praising Martin, and all the world said, "I hear this Doc Arrowsmith is the only fellow Agnes ever doctored with that's done her a mite of
good."

He  gathered  a  practice  small,  sound, and in no way remarkable. Leora and he moved from the Tozers' to a cottage of their own, with a parlor-
dining-room  which displayed a nickeled stove on bright, new, pleasant-smelling linoleum, and a golden-oak sideboard with a souvenir match-holder
from  Lake  Minnetonka.  He  bought a small Roentgen ray outfit; and he was made a director of the Tozer bank. He became too busy to long for his
days of scientific research, which had never existed, and Leora sighed:

"It's  fierce,  being  married.  I  did  expect  I'd have to follow you out on the road and be a hobo, but I never expected to be a Pillar of the
Community.  Well, I'm too lazy to look up a new husband. Only I warn you: when you become the Sunday School superintendent, you needn't expect me
to play the organ and smile at the cute jokes you make about Willy's not learning his Golden Text."


II


So did Martin stumble into respectability.

In  the  autumn  of  1912, when Mr. Debs, Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Wilson, and Mr. Taft were campaigning for the presidency, when Martin Arrowsmith had
lived  in Wheatsylvania for a year and a half, Bert Tozer became a Prominent Booster. He returned from the state convention of the Modern Woodmen
of  America  with  notions.  Several  towns  had sent boosting delegations to the convention, and the village of Groningen had turned out a motor
procession of five cars, each with an enormous pennant, "Groningen for White Men and Black Dirt."

Bert  came  back clamoring that every motor in town must carry a Wheatsylvania pennant. He had bought thirty of them and they were on sale at the
bank at seventy-five cents apiece. This, Bert explained to everyone who came into the bank, was exactly cost-price, which was within eleven cents
of the truth. He came galloping at Martin, demanding that he be the first to display a pennant.

"I don't want one of those fool things flopping from my 'bus," protested Martin. "What's the idea, anyway?"

"What's the IDEA? To advertise your own town, of course!"

"What  is  there  to  advertise?  Do  you  think you're going to make strangers believe Wheatsylvania is a metropolis like New York or Jimtown by
hanging a dusty rag behind a secondhand tin Lizzie?"

"You never did have any patriotism! Let me tell you, Mart, if you don't put on a banner I'll see to it that everybody in town notices it!"

While  the other rickety cars of the village announced to the world, or at least to several square miles of the world, that Wheatsylvania was the
"Wonder Town of Central N. D.," Martin's clattering Ford went bare; and when his enemy Norblom remarked, "I like to see a fellow have some public
spirit  and  appreciate  the  place  he  gets  his money outa," the citizenry nodded and spat, and began to question Martin's fame as a worker of
miracles.


III


He  had  intimates--the  barber, the editor of the Eagle, the garageman--to whom he talked comfortably of hunting and the crops, and with whom he
played  poker.  Perhaps  he was too intimate with them. It was the theory of Crynssen County that it was quite all right for a young professional
man  to  take  a timely drink providing he kept it secret and made up for it by yearning over the clergy of the neighborhood. But with the clergy
Martin was brief, and his drinking and poker he never concealed.

If  he  was bored by the United Brethren minister's discourse on doctrine, on the wickedness of movies, and the scandalous pay of pastors, it was
not  at  all because he was a distant and supersensitive young man but because he found more savor in the garageman's salty remarks on the art of
remembering to ante in poker.

Through  all  the  state there were celebrated poker players, rustic-looking men with stolid faces, men who sat in shirtsleeves, chewing tobacco;
men whose longest remark was "By me," and who delighted to plunder the gilded and condescending traveling salesmen. When there was news of a "big
game  on,"  the  county  sports  dropped  in silently and went to work--the sewing-machine agent from Leopolis, the undertaker from Vanderheide's
Grove, the bootlegger from St. Luke, the red fat man from Melody who had no known profession.

Once (still do men tell of it gratefully, up and down the Valley), they played for seventy-two unbroken hours, in the office of the Wheatsylvania
garage. It had been a livery-stable; it was littered with robes and long whips, and the smell of horses mingled with the reek of gasoline.

The players came and went, and sometimes they slept on the floor for an hour or two, but they were never less than four in the game. The stink of
cheap  feeble cigarettes and cheap powerful cigars hovered about the table like a malign spirit; the floor was scattered with stubs, matches, old
cards,  and  whisky  bottles.  Among the warriors were Martin, Alec Ingleblad the barber, and a highway engineer, all of them stripped to flannel
undershirts, not moving for hour on hour, ruffling their cards, eyes squinting and vacant.

When  Bert  Tozer heard of the affair, he feared for the good fame of Wheatsylvania, and to everyone he gossiped about Martin's evil ways and his
own  patience.  Thus  it  happened  that  while Martin was at the height of his prosperity and credit as a physician, along the Pony River Valley
sinuated the whispers that he was a gambler, that he was a "drinking man," that he never went to church; and all the godly enjoyed mourning, "Too
bad to see a decent young man like that going to the dogs."

Martin was as impatient as he was stubborn. He resented the well-meant greetings: "You ought to leave a little hooch for the rest of us to drink,
Doc,"  or  "I s'pose you're too busy playing poker to drive out to the house and take a look at the woman." He was guilty of an absurd and boyish
tactlessness  when  he  heard  Norblom observing to the postmaster, "A fellow that calls himself a doctor just because he had luck with that fool
Agnes Ingleblad, he hadn't ought to go getting drunk and disgracing--"

Martin stopped. "Norblom! You talking about me?"

The storekeeper turned slowly. "I got more important things to do 'n talk about you," he cackled.

As Martin went on he heard laughter.

He  told  himself that these villagers were generous; that their snooping was in part an affectionate interest, and inevitable in a village where
the  most  absorbing  event  of  the year was the United Brethren Sunday School picnic on Fourth of July. But he could not rid himself of twitchy
discomfort  at  their  unending and maddeningly detailed comments on everything. He felt as though the lightest word he said in his consultation-
room would be megaphoned from flapping ear to ear all down the country roads.

He  was  contented enough in gossiping about fishing with the barber, nor was he condescending to meteorologicomania, but except for Leora he had
no one with whom he could talk of his work. Angus Duer had been cold, but Angus had his teeth into every change of surgical technique, and he was
an  acrid  debater.  Martin saw that, unless he struggled, not only would he harden into timid morality under the pressure of the village, but be
fixed in a routine of prescriptions and bandaging.

He might find a stimulant in Dr. Hesselink of Groningen.

He  had  seen  Hesselink only once, but everywhere he heard of him as the most honest practitioner in the Valley. On impulse Martin drove down to
call on him.

Dr.  Hesselink  was  a  man  of forty, ruddy, tall, broad-shouldered. You knew immediately that he was careful and that he was afraid of nothing,
however  much  he  might lack in imagination. He received Martin with no vast ebullience, and his stare said, "Well, what do you want? I'm a busy
man."

"Doctor," Martin chattered, "do you find it hard to keep up with medical developments?"

"No. Read the medical journals."

"Well,  don't  you--gosh,  I  don't  want to get sentimental about it, but don't you find that without contact with the Big Guns you get mentally
lazy--sort of lacking in inspiration?"

"I do not! There's enough inspiration for me in trying to help the sick."

To himself Martin was protesting, "All right, if you don't want to be friendly, go to the devil!" But he tried again:

"I  know.  But  for  the  game of the thing, for the pleasure of increasing medical knowledge, how can you keep up if you don't have anything but
routine practice among a lot of farmers?"

"Arrowsmith,  I  may do you an injustice, but there's a lot of you young practitioners who feel superior to the farmers, that are doing their own
jobs  better than you are. You think that if you were only in the city with libraries and medical meetings and everything, you'd develop. Well, I
don't  know  of anything to prevent your studying at home! You consider yourself so much better educated than these rustics, but I notice you say
'gosh'  and  'Big  Guns'  and  that  sort of thing. How much do you read? Personally, I'm extremely well satisfied. My people pay me an excellent
living  wage,  they  appreciate  my  work, and they honor me by election to the schoolboard. I find that a good many of these farmers think a lot
harder and squarer than the swells I meet in the city. Well! I don't see any reason for feeling superior, or lonely either!"

"Hell,  I  don't!"  Martin  mumbled.  As  he  drove  back  he  raged  at Hesselink's superiority about not feeling superior, but he stumbled into
uncomfortable  meditation.  It was true; he was half-educated. He was supposed to be a college graduate but he knew nothing of economics, nothing
of  history,  nothing  of  music or painting. Except in hasty bolting for examinations he had read no poetry save that of Robert Service, and the
only  prose  besides  medical  journalism  at  which  he looked nowadays was the baseball and murder news in the Minneapolis papers and Wild West
stories in the magazines.

He reviewed the "intelligent conversation" which, in the desert of Wheatsylvania, he believed himself to have conducted at Mohalis. He remembered
that  to  Clif  Clawson  it had been pretentious to use any phrase which was not as colloquial and as smutty as the speech of a truck-driver, and
that  his  own  discourse had differed from Clif's largely in that it had been less fantastic and less original. He could recall nothing save the
philosophy  of  Max  Gottlieb, occasional scoldings of Angus Duer, one out of ten among Madeline Fox's digressions, and the councils of Dad Silva
which was above the level of Alec Ingleblad's barber-shop.

He came home hating Hesselink but by no means loving himself; he fell upon Leora and, to her placid agreement, announced that they were "going to
get educated, if it kills us." He went at it as he had gone at bacteriology.

He  read  European  history  aloud at Leora, who looked interested or at least forgiving; he worried the sentences in a copy of "The Golden Bowl"
which  an  unfortunate  school-teacher had left at the Tozers'; he borrowed a volume of Conrad from the village editor and afterward, as he drove
the  prairie  roads,  he  was marching into jungle villages--sun helmets, orchids, lost temples of obscene and dog-faced deities, secret and sun-
scarred rivers. He was conscious of his own mean vocabulary. It cannot be said that he became immediately and conspicuously articulate, yet it is
possible  that  in  those  long intense evenings of reading with Leora he advanced a step or two toward the tragic enchantments of Max Gottlieb's
world--enchanting sometimes and tragic always.

But in becoming a schoolboy again he was not so satisfied as Dr. Hesselink.


IV


Gustaf Sondelius was back in America.

In  medical  school,  Martin  had  read  of  Sondelius, the soldier of science. He held reasonable and lengthy degrees, but he was a rich man and
eccentric,  and  neither  toiled  in  laboratories nor had a decent office and a home and a lacy wife. He roamed the world fighting epidemics and
founding  institutions  and  making  inconvenient  speeches  and  trying  new drinks. He was a Swede by birth, a German by education, a little of
everything  by speech, and his clubs were in London, Paris, Washington, and New York. He had been heard of from Batoum and Fuchau, from Milan and
Bechuanaland,  from  Antofagasta  and  Cape  Romanzoff.  Manson  on  Tropical Diseases mentions Sondelius's admirable method of killing rats with
hydrocyanic acid gas, and The Sketch once mentioned his atrocious system in baccarat.

Gustaf  Sondelius  shouted,  in  high  places and low, that most diseases could be and must be wiped out; that tuberculosis, cancer, typhoid, the
plague, influenza, were an invading army against which the world must mobilize--literally; that public health authorities must supersede generals
and oil kings. He was lecturing through America, and his exclamatory assertions were syndicated in the press.

Martin  sniffed  at most newspaper articles touching on science or health but Sondelius's violence caught him, and suddenly he was converted, and
it was an important thing for him, that conversion.

He  told  himself  that however much he might relieve the sick, essentially he was a business man, in rivalry with Dr. Winter of Leopolis and Dr.
Hesselink  of  Groningen;  that  though  they  might be honest, honesty and healing were less their purpose than making money; that to get rid of
avoidable  disease  and produce a healthy population would be the worst thing in the world for them; and that they must all be replaced by public
health officials.

Like  all  ardent  agnostics,  Martin was a religious man. Since the death of his Gottlieb-cult he had unconsciously sought a new passion, and he
found it now in Gustaf Sondelius's war on disease. Immediately he became as annoying to his patients as he had once been to Digamma Pi.

He informed the farmers at Delft that they had no right to have so much tuberculosis.

This  was  infuriating, because none of their rights as American citizens was better established, or more often used, than the privilege of being
ill.  They  fumed,  "Who  does  he think he is? We call him in for doctoring, not for bossing. Why, the damn' fool said we ought to burn down our
houses--said we were committing a crime if we had the con. here! Won't stand for nobody talking to me like that!"

Everything  became clear to Martin--too clear. The nation must make the best physicians autocratic officials, at once, and that was all there was
to  it.  As  to  how the officials were to become perfect executives, and how people were to be persuaded to obey them, he had no suggestions but
only  a beautiful faith. At breakfast he scolded, "Another idiotic day of writing prescriptions for bellyaches that ought never to have happened!
If I could only get into the Big Fight, along with men like Sondelius! It makes me tired!"

Leora murmured, "Yes, darling. I'll promise to be good. I won't have any little bellyaches or T.B. or anything, so please don't lecture me!"

Even in his irritability he was gentle, for Leora was with child.


V


Their baby was coming in five months. Martin promised to it everything he had missed.

"He's  going  to  have a real education!" he gloated, as they sat on the porch in spring twilight. "He'll learn all this literature and stuff. We
haven't  done  much ourselves--here we are, stuck in this two-by-twice crossroads for the rest of our lives--but maybe we've gone a little beyond
our dads, and he'll go way beyond us."

He  was  worried,  for  all  his  flamboyance. Leora had undue morning sickness. Till noon she dragged about the house, pea-green and tousled and
hollow-faced.  He  found  a  sort  of  maid,  and came home to help, to wipe the dishes and sweep the front walk. All evening he read to her, not
history  now  and  Henry  James  but  "Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch," which both of them esteemed a very fine tale. He sat on the floor by the
grubby second-hand couch on which she lay in her weakness; he held her hand and crowed:

"Golly, we-- No, not 'golly.' Well, what CAN you say except 'golly'? Anyway: Some day we'll save up enough money for a couple months in Italy and
all  those places. All those old narrow streets and old castles! There must be scads of 'em that are couple hundred years old or older! And we'll
take  the  boy  .  . . Even if he turns out to be a girl, darn him! . . . And he'll learn to chatter Wop and French and everything like a regular
native,  and his dad and mother'll be so proud! Oh, we'll be a fierce pair of old birds! We never did have any more morals 'n a rabbit, either of
us,  and  probably  when we're seventy we'll sit out on the doorstep and smoke pipes and snicker at all the respectable people going by, and tell
each  other  scandalous  stories about 'em till they want to take a shot at us, and our boy--he'll wear a plug hat and have a chauffeur--he won't
dare to recognize us!"

Trained  now to the false cheerfulness of the doctor, he shouted, when she was racked and ghastly with the indignity of morning sickness, "There,
that's  fine,  old girl! Wouldn't be making a good baby if you weren't sick. Everybody is." He was lying, and he was nervous. Whenever he thought
of  her  dying,  he seemed to die with her. Barren of her companionship, there would be nothing he wanted to do, nowhere to go. What would be the
worth of having all the world if he could not show it to her, if she was not there--

He  denounced  Nature for her way of tricking human beings, by every gay device of moonlight and white limbs and reaching loneliness, into having
babies,  then  making birth as cruel and clumsy and wasteful as she could. He was abrupt and jerky with patients who called him into the country.
With their suffering he was sympathetic as he had never been, for his eyes had opened to the terrible beauty of pain, but he must not go far from
Leora's need.

Her  morning  sickness  turned into pernicious vomiting. Suddenly, while she was torn and inhuman with agony, he sent for Dr. Hesselink, and that
horrible  afternoon  when  the  prairie  spring was exuberant outside the windows of the poor iodoform-reeking room, they took the baby from her,
dead.

Had  it  been  possible, he might have understood Hesselink's success then, have noted that gravity and charm, that pity and sureness, which made
people  entrust  their  lives  to  him.  Not  cold  and blaming was Hesselink now, but an older and wiser brother, very compassionate. Martin saw
nothing. He was not a physician. He was a terrified boy, less useful to Hesselink than the dullest nurse.

When he was certain that Leora would recover, Martin sat by her bed, coaxing, "We'll just have to make up our minds we never can have a baby now,
and so I want-- Oh, I'm no good! And I've got a rotten temper. But to you, I want to be everything!"

She whispered, scarce to be heard:

"He  would  have  been  such a sweet baby. Oh, I know! I saw him so often. Because I knew he was going to be like you, When you were a baby." She
tried  to  laugh.  "Perhaps  I  wanted him because I could boss him. I've never had anybody that would let me boss him. So if I can't have a real
baby,  I'll have to bring you up. Make you a great man that everybody will wonder at, like your Sondelius. . . . Darling, I worried so about your
worrying--"

He kissed her, and for hours they sat together, unspeaking, eternally understanding, in the prairie twilight.




Chapter 17



Dr. Coughlin of Leopolis had a red mustache, a large heartiness, and a Maxwell which, though it was three years old this May and deplorable as to
varnish, he believed to be the superior in speed and beauty of any motor in Dakota.

He came home in high cheerfulness, rode the youngest of his three children pickaback, and remarked to his wife:

"Tessie, I got a swell idea."

"Yes, and you got a swell breath, too. I wish you'd quit testing that old Spirits Frumentus bottle at the drug store!"

"'At a girl! But honest, listen!"

"I will not!" She bussed him heartily. "Nothing doing about driving to Los Angeles this summer. Too far, with all the brats squalling."

"Sure.  All  right.  But  I mean: Let's pack up and light out and spend a week touring 'round the state. Say tomorrow or next day. Got nothing to
keep me now except that obstetrical case, and we'll hand that over to Winter."

"All  right.  We  can  try  out the new thermos bottles!" Dr. Coughlin, his lady, and the children started at four in the morning. The car was at
first  too  well  arranged  to  be  interesting,  but after three days, as he approached you on the flat road that without an inch of curving was
slashed  for  leagues  through  the grassy young wheat, you saw the doctor in his khaki suit, his horn-rimmed spectacles, and white linen boating
hat;  his  wife  in  a green flannel blouse and a lace boudoir cap. The rest of the car was slightly confused. While you motored by you noticed a
canvas Egyptian Water Bottle, mud on wheels and fenders, a spade, two older children leaning perilously out and making tongues at you, the baby's
diapers hanging on a line across the tonneau, a torn copy of Snappy Stories, seven lollypop sticks, a jack, a fish-rod, and a rolled tent.

Your last impression was of two large pennants labeled "Leopolis, N. D.," and "Excuse Our Dust."

The Coughlins had agreeable adventures. Once they were stuck in a mud-hole. To the shrieking admiration of the family, the doctor got them out by
making a bridge of fence rails. Once the ignition ceased and, while they awaited a garageman summoned by telephone, they viewed a dairy farm with
an  electrical  milking  machine.  All the way they were broadened by travel, and discovered the wonders of the great world: the movie theater at
Roundup,  which  had  for  orchestra not only a hand-played piano but also a violin; the black fox farm at Melody; and the Severance water-tower,
which was said to be the tallest in Central North Dakota.

Dr. Coughlin "dropped in to pass the time of day," as he said, with all the doctors. At St. Luke he had an intimate friend in Dr. Tromp--at least
they  had  met  twice, at the annual meetings of the Pony River Valley Medical Association. When he told Tromp how bad they had found the hotels,
Tromp looked uneasy and conscientious, and sighed, "If the wife could fix it up somehow, I'd like to invite you all to stay with us tonight."

"Oh, don't want to impose on you. Sure it wouldn't be any trouble?" said Coughlin.

After  Mrs.  Tromp had recovered from her desire to call her husband aside and make unheard but vigorous observations, and after the oldest Tromp
boy  had  learned  that "it wasn't nice for a little gentleman to kick his wee guests that came from so far, far away," they were all very happy.
Mrs.  Coughlin  and Mrs. Tromp bewailed the cost of laundry soap and butter, and exchanged recipes for pickled peaches, while the men, sitting on
the edge of the porch, their knees crossed, eloquently waving their cigars, gave themselves up to the ecstasy of shop-talk:

"Say, Doctor, how do you find collections?"

(It was Coughlin speaking--or it might have been Tromp.)

"Well, they're pretty good. These Germans pay up first rate. Never send 'em a bill, but when they've harvested they come in and say, 'How much do
I owe you, Doctor?'"

"Yuh, the Germans are pretty good pay."

"Yump, they certainly are. Not many dead-beats among the Germans."

"Yes, that's a fact. Say, tell me, Doctor, what do you do with your jaundice cases?"

"Well, I'll tell you, Doctor: if it's a persistent case I usually give ammonium chlorid."

"Do  you? I've been giving ammonium chlorid but here the other day I see a communication in the Journal of the A.M.A. where a fellow was claiming
it wasn't any good."

"Is that a fact! Well, well! I didn't see that. Hum. Well. Say, Doctor, do you find you can do much with asthma?"

"Well now, Doctor, just in confidence, I'm going to tell you something that may strike you as funny, but I believe that foxes' lungs are fine for
asthma,  and  T.B.  too. I told that to a Sioux City pulmonary specialist one time and he laughed at me--said it wasn't scientific--and I said to
him,  'Hell!'  I said, 'scientific!' I said, 'I don't know if it's the latest fad and wrinkle in science or not,' I said, 'but I get results, and
that's  what  I'm  looking  for  's  results!' I said. I tell you a plug G.P. may not have a lot of letters after his name, but he sees a slew of
mysterious things that he can't explain, and I swear I believe most of these damn' alleged scientists could learn a whale of a lot from the plain
country practitioners, let me tell you!"

"Yuh,  that's  a  fact.  Personally  I'd  rather  stay  right here in the country and be able to do a little hunting and take it easy than be the
classiest  specialist  in  the cities. One time I kind of figured on becoming an X-ray specialist--place in New York where you can take the whole
course  in  eight  weeks--and  maybe  settling  in  Butte  or  Sioux Falls, but I figured that even if I got to making eight-ten thousand a year,
'twouldn't hardly mean more than three thousand does here and so-- And a fellow has to consider his duty to his old patients."

"That's so. . . . Say, Doctor, say, what sort of fellow is McMinturn, down your way?"

"Well,  I  don't  like  to knock any fellow practitioner, and I suppose he's well intentioned, but just between you and me he does too confounded
much  guesswork.  Now  you  take  you and me, we apply SCIENCE to a case, instead of taking a chance and just relying on experience and going off
half-cocked.  But  McMinturn,  he doesn't know enough. And SAY, that wife of his, she's a caution--she's got the meanest tongue in four counties,
and the way she chases around drumming up business for Mac-- Well, I suppose that's their way of doing business."

"Is old Winter keeping going?"

"Oh,  yes, in a sort of way. You know how he is. Of course he's about twenty years behind the times, but he's a great hand-holder--keep some fool
woman in bed six weeks longer than he needs to, and call around twice a day and chin with her--absolutely unnecessary."

"I suppose you get your biggest competition from Silzer, Doctor?"

"Don't  you believe it, Doctor! He isn't beginning to do the practice he lets on to. Trouble with Silzer is, he's too brash--shoots off his mouth
too  much--likes  to  hear  himself  talk. Oh, say, by the way, have you run into this new fellow--will been located here about two years now--at
Wheatsylvania--Arrowsmith?"

"No, but they say he's a good bright young fellow."

"Yes, they claim he's a brainy man--very well-informed--and I hear his wife is a nice brainy little woman."

"I hear Arrowsmith hits it up too much though--likes his booze awful' well."

"Yes,  so they say. Shame, for a nice hustling young fellow. I like a nip myself, now and then, but a Drinking Man--! Suppose he's drunk and gets
called  out  on a case! And a fellow from down there was telling me Arrowsmith is great on books and study, but he's a freethinker--never goes to
church."

"Is  that  a  fact! Hm. Great mistake for any doctor to not identify himself with some good solid religious denomination, whether he believes the
stuff or not. I tell you a priest or a preacher can send you an awful lot of business."

"You bet he can! Well, this fellow said Arrowsmith was always arguing with the preachers--he told some Reverend that everybody ought to read this
immunologist  Max  Gottlieb,  and  this Jacques Loeb--you know--the fellow that, well, I don't recall just exactly what it was, but he claimed he
could create living fishes out of chemicals."

"Sure!  There  you  got  it!  That's the kind of delusions these laboratory fellows get unless they have some practical practice to keep 'em well
balanced. Well, if Arrowsmith falls for that kind of fellow, no wonder people don't trust him."

"That's  so. Hm. Well, it's too bad Arrowsmith goes drinking and helling around and neglecting his family and his patients. I can see his finish.
Shame. Well--wonder what time o' night it's getting to be?"


II


Bert Tozer wailed, "Mart, what you been doing to Dr. Coughlin of Leopolis? Fellow told me he was going around saying you were a booze-hoister and
so on."

"Did he? People do sort of keep an eye on one another around here, don't they?"

"You bet your life they do, and that's why I tell you you ought to cut out the poker and the booze. You don't see ME needing any liquor, do you?"

Martin  more desperately than ever felt the whole county watching him. He was not a praise-eater; he was not proud that he should feel misplaced;
but however sturdily he struggled he saw himself outside the picture of Wheatsylvania and trudging years of country practice.

Suddenly,  without  planning  it, forgetting in his admiration for Sondelius and the health war his pride of the laboratory, he was thrown into a
research problem.


III


There was blackleg among the cattle in Crynssen County. The state veterinarian had been called and Dawson Hunziker vaccine had been injected, but
the  disease  spread.  Martin heard the farmers wailing. He noted that the injected cattle showed no inflammation nor rise in temperature. He was
roused by a suspicion that the Hunziker vaccine had insufficient living organisms, and he went yelping on the trail of his hypothesis.

He obtained (by misrepresentations) a supply of the vaccine and tested it in his stuffy closet of a laboratory. He had to work out his own device
for  growing  anaerobic  cultures,  but he had been trained by the Gottlieb who remarked, "Any man dat iss unable to build a filter out of toot'-
picks,  if he has to, would maybe better buy his results along with his fine equipment." Out of a large fruit-jar and a soldered pipe Martin made
his apparatus.

When he was altogether sure that the vaccine did not contain living blackleg organisms, he was much more delighted than if he had found that good
Mr. Dawson Hunziker was producing honest vaccine.

With no excuse and less encouragement he isolated blackleg organisms from sick cattle and prepared an attenuated vaccine of his own. It took much
time. He did not neglect his patients but certainly he failed to appear in the stores, at the poker games. Leora and he dined on a sandwich every
evening  and  hastened  to the laboratory, to heat the cultures in the improvised water-bath, an ancient and leaky oatmeal-cooker with an alcohol
lamp.  The  Martin  who  had been impatient of Hesselink was of endless patience as he watched his results. He whistled and hummed, and the hours
from  seven to midnight were a moment. Leora, frowning placidly, the tip of her tongue at the corner of her mouth, guarded the temperature like a
good little watchdog.

After  three efforts with two absurd failures, he had a vaccine which satisfied him, and he injected a stricken herd. The blackleg stopped, which
was  for  Martin the end and the reward, and he turned his notes and supply of vaccine over to the state veterinarian. For others, it was not the
end. The veterinarian of the county denounced him for intruding on their right to save or kill cattle; the physicians hinted, "That's the kind of
monkey-business  that  ruins the dignity of the profession. I tell you Arrowsmith's a medical nihilist and a notoriety-seeker, that's what he is.
You mark my words, instead of his sticking to decent regular practice, you'll be hearing of his opening a quack sanitarium, one of these days!"

He commented to Leora:

"Dignity,  hell! If I had my way I'd be doing research--oh, not this cold detached stuff of Gottlieb but really practical work--and then I'd have
some  fellow  like  Sondelius  take my results and jam 'em down people's throats, and I'd make them and their cattle and their tabby-cats healthy
whether they wanted to be or not, that's what I'd do!"

In  this  mood he read in his Minneapolis paper, between a half column on the marriage of the light middleweight champion and three lines devoted
to the lynching of an I.W.W. agitator, the announcement:


Gustave  Sundelios,  well-known  authority on cholera prevention, will give an address on "Heroes of Health" at the University summer school next
Friday evening.


He  ran  into  the  house  gloating,  "Lee!  Sondelius  going  to  lecture  in Minneapolis. I'm going! Come on! We'll hear him and have a bat and
everything!"

"No,  you  run  down by yourself. Be fine for you to get away from the town and the family and me for a while. I'll go down with you in the fall.
Honestly. If I'm not in the way, maybe you can manage to have a good long talk with Dr. Sondelius."

"Fat chance! The big city physicians and the state health authorities will be standing around him ten deep. But I'm going."


IV


The  prairie was hot, the wheat rattled in a weary breeze, the day-coach was gritty with cinders. Martin was cramped by the hours of slow riding.
He drowsed and smoked and meditated. "I'm going to forget medicine and everything else," he vowed. "I'll go up and talk to somebody in the smoker
and tell him I'm a shoe-salesman."

He  did.  Unfortunately  his  confidant  happened  to  be a real shoe-salesman, with a large curiosity as to what firm Martin represented, and he
returned  to  the  day  coach  with  a  renewed sense of injury. When he reached Minneapolis, in mid-afternoon, he hastened to the University and
besought  a  ticket to the Sondelius lecture before he had even found a hotel, though not before he had found the long glass of beer which he had
been picturing for a hundred miles.

He  had  an  informal but agreeable notion of spending his first evening of freedom in dissipation. Somewhere he would meet a company of worthies
who  would  succor  him  with  laughter and talk and many drinks--not too many drinks, of course--and motor very rapidly to Lake Minnetonka for a
moonlight  swim.  He  began  his  search  for the brethren by having a cocktail at a hotel bar and dinner in a Hennepin Avenue restaurant. Nobody
looked  at  him,  nobody  seemed  to  desire a companion. He was lonely for Leora, and all his state of grace, all his earnest and simple-hearted
devotion to carousal, degenerated into sleepiness.

As  he  turned  and  turned in his hotel bed he lamented, "And probably the Sondelius lecture will be rotten. Probably he's simply another Roscoe
Geake."


V


In the hot night desultory students wandered up to the door of the lecture-hall, scanned the modest Sondelius poster, and ambled away. Martin was
half  minded  to desert with them, and he went in sulkily. The hall was a third full of summer students and teachers, and men who might have been
doctors  or  school-principals. He sat at the back, fanning with his straw hat, disliking the man with side-whiskers who shared the row with him,
disapproving of Gustaf Sondelius, and as to himself having no good opinions whatever.

Then  the room was charged with vitality. Down the central aisle, ineffectively attended by a small fussy person, thundered a man with a smile, a
broad  brow,  and  a  strawpile  of  curly  flaxen hair--a Newfoundland dog of a man. Martin sat straight. He was strengthened to endure even the
depressing man with side-whiskers as Sondelius launched out, in a musical bellow with Swedish pronunciation and Swedish singsong:

"The  medical  profession can have but one desire: to destroy the medical profession. As for the laymen, they can be sure of but one thing: nine-
tenths  of  what  they  know about health is not so, and with the other tenth they do nothing. As Butler shows in 'Erewhon'--the swine stole that
idea from me, too, maybe thirty years before I ever got it--the only crime for w'ich we should hang people is having toobercoolosis."

"Umph!" grunted the studious audience, doubtful whether it was fitting to be amused, offended, bored, or edified.

Sondelius was a roarer and a playboy, but he knew incantations. With him Martin watched the heroes of yellow fever, Reed, Agramonte, Carroll, and
Lazear;  with him he landed in a Mexican port stilled with the plague and famished beneath the virulent sun; with him rode up the mountain trails
to  a  hill  town  rotted with typhus; with him, in crawling August, when babies were parched skeletons, fought an ice trust beneath the gilt and
blunted sword of the law.

"That's  what  I  want  to  do! Not just tinker at a lot of worn-out bodies but make a new world!" Martin hungered. "Gosh, I'd follow him through
fire!  And  the  way  he lays out the crapehangers that criticize public health results! If I could only manage to meet him and talk to him for a
couple o' minutes--"

He  lingered  after the lecture. A dozen people surrounded Sondelius on the platform; a few shook hands; a few asked questions; a doctor worried,
"But  how  about  the danger of free clinics and all those things drifting into socialism?" Martin stood back till Sondelius had been deserted. A
janitor was closing the windows, very firmly and suggestively. Sondelius looked about, and Martin would have sworn that the Great Man was lonely.
He shook hands with him, and quaked:

"Sir, if you aren't due some place, I wonder if you'd like to come out and have a--a--"

Sondelius loomed over him in solar radiance and rumbled, "Have a drink? Well, I think maybe I would. How did the joke about the dog and his fleas
go tonight? Do you think they liked it?"

"Oh, sure, you bet."

The  warrior who had been telling of feeding five thousand Tatars, of receiving a degree from a Chinese university and refusing a decoration from
quite  a  good  Balkan  king, looked affectionately on his band of one disciple and demanded, "Was it all right--was it? Did they like it? So hot
tonight,  and I been lecturing nine time a week--Des Moines, Fort Dodge, LaCrosse, Elgin, Joliet [but he pronounced it Zho-lee-ay] and--I forget.
Was it all right? Did they like it?"

"Simply corking! Oh, they just ate it up! Honestly, I've never enjoyed anything so much in my life!"

The  prophet  crowed,  "Come!  I buy a drink. As a hygienist, I war on alcohol. In excessive quantities it is almost as bad as coffee or even ice
cream  soda.  But  as  one who is fond of talking, I find a nice long whisky and soda a great solvent of human idiocy. Is there a cool place with
some Pilsener here in Detroit--no; where am I tonight?--Minneapolis?"

"I understand there's a good beer-garden. And we can get the trolley right near here."

Sondelius stared at him. "Oh, I have a taxi waiting."

Martin was abashed by this luxury. In the taxi-cab he tried to think of the proper things to say to a celebrity.

"Tell me, Doctor, do they have city health boards in Europe?"

Sondelius  ignored  him.  "Did  you see that girl going by? What ankles! What shoulders! Is it good beer at the beer-garden? Have they any decent
cognac?  Do you know Courvoisier 1865 cognac? Oof! Lecturing! I swear I will give it up. And wearing dress clothes a night like this! You know, I
mean  all  the crazy things I say in my lectures, but let us now forget being earnest, let us drink, let us sing 'Der Graf von Luxemburg,' let us
detach exquisite girls from their escorts, let us discuss the joys of 'Die Meistersinger,' which only I appreciate!"

In  the  beer-garden  the  tremendous  Sondelius  discoursed  of  the  Cosmos Club, Halle's investigation of infant mortality, the suitability of
combining benedictine and apple-jack, Biarritz, Lord Haldane, the Doane-Buckley method of milk examination, George Gissing, and homard thermidor.
Martin  looked  for  a connection between Sondelius and himself, as one does with the notorious or with people met abroad. He might have said, "I
think  I  met  a man who knows you," or "I have had the pleasure of reading all your articles," but he fished with "Did you ever run into the two
big men in my medical school--Winnemac--Dean Silva and Max Gottlieb?"

"Silva?  I  don't  remember.  But  Gottlieb--you  know him? Oh!" Sondelius waved his mighty arms. "The greatest! The spirit of science! I had the
pleasure  to  talk  with  him at McGurk. He would not sit here bawling like me! He makes me like a circus clown! He takes all my statements about
epidemiology and shows me I am a fool! Ho, ho, ho!" He beamed, and was off on a denunciation of high tariff.

Each topic had its suitable refreshment. Sondelius was a fantastic drinker, and zinc-lined. He mixed Pilsener, whisky, black coffee, and a liquid
which  the waiter asserted to be absinthe. "I should go to bed at midnight," he lamented, "but it is a cardinal sin to interrupt good talk. Yoost
tempt  me  a little! I am an easy one to be tempted! But I must have five hours' sleep. Absolute! I lecture in--it's some place in Iowa--tomorrow
evening.  Now that I am past fifty, I cannot get along with three hours as I used to, and yet I have found so many new things that I want to talk
about."

He  was  more  eloquent than ever; then he was annoyed. A surly-looking man at the next table listened and peered, and laughed at them. Sondelius
dropped from Haffkine's cholera serum to an irate:

"If that fellow stares at me some more, I am going over and kill him! I am a peaceful man, now that I am not so young, but I do not like starers.
I will go and argue with him. I will yoost hit him a little!"

While  the waiters came rushing, Sondelius charged the man, threatened him with enormous fists, then stopped, shook hands repeatedly, and brought
him back to Martin.

"This is a born countryman of mine, from Gottenborg. He is a carpenter. Sit down, Nilsson, sit down and have a drink. Herumph! VAI-ter!"

The  carpenter  was  a socialist, a Swedish Seventh Day Adventist, a ferocious arguer, and fond of drinking aquavit. He denounced Sondelius as an
aristocrat,  he  denounced  Martin  for  his  ignorance of economics, he denounced the waiter concerning the brandy; Sondelius and Martin and the
waiter  answered  with  vigor;  and  the  conversation  became admirable. Presently they were turned out of the beer-garden and the three of them
crowded  into  the still waiting taxicab, which shook to their debating. Where they went, Martin could never trace. He may have dreamed the whole
tale.  Once  they  were  apparently in a roadhouse on a long street which must have been University Avenue; once in a saloon on Washington Avenue
South, where three tramps were sleeping at the end of the bar; once in the carpenter's house, where an unexplained man made coffee for them.

Wherever  they  might  be,  they  were  at  the same time in Moscow and Curacao and Murwillumbah. The carpenter created communistic states, while
Sondelius,  proclaiming  that  he  did not care whether he worked under socialism or an emperor so long as he could bully people into being well,
annihilated tuberculosis and by dawn had cancer fleeing.

They  parted  at  four,  tearfully  swearing  to  meet  again,  in Minnesota or Stockholm, in Rio or on the southern seas, and Martin started for
Wheatsylvania to put an end to all this nonsense of allowing people to be ill.

And  the  great god Sondelius had slain Dean Silva, as Silva had slain Gottlieb, Gottlieb had slain "Encore" Edwards the playful chemist, Edwards
had slain Doc Vickerson, and Vickerson had slain the minister's son who had a real trapeze in his barn.




Chapter 18



Dr. Woestijne of Vanderheide's Grove acted in spare time as Superintendent of Health for Crynssen County, but the office was not well paid and it
did not greatly interest him. When Martin burst in and offered to do all the work for half the pay, Woestijne accepted with benevolence, assuring
him that it would have a great effect on his private practice.

It did. It almost ruined his private practice.

There  was  never  an official appointment. Martin signed Woestijne's name (spelling it in various interesting ways, depending on how he felt) to
papers, and the Board of County Commissioners recognized Martin's limited power, but the whole thing was probably illegal.

There  was  small  science  and considerably less heroism in his first furies as a health officer, but a great deal of irritation for his fellow-
townsmen.  He  poked  into  yards,  he  denounced  Mrs.  Beeson for her reeking ash-barrels, Mr. Norblom for piling manure on the street, and the
schoolboard  for the school ventilation and lack of instruction in tooth-brushing. The citizens had formerly been agitated by his irreligion, his
moral  looseness,  and  his  lack  of  local  patriotism,  but when they were prodded out of their comfortable and probably beneficial dirt, they
exploded.

Martin  was  honest  and  appallingly  earnest, but if he had the innocence of the dove he lacked the wisdom of the serpent. He did not make them
understand  his  mission;  he  scarce tried to make them understand. His authority, as Woestijne's alter ego, was imposing on paper but feeble in
action, and it was worthless against the stubbornness which he aroused.

He  advanced  from  garbage-spying  to  a  drama  of  infection.  The  community  at Delft had a typhoid epidemic which slackened and continually
reappeared.  The villagers believed that it came from a tribe of squatters six miles up the creek, and they considered lynching the offenders, as
a  practical  protest and an interesting break in wheat-farming. When Martin insisted that in six miles the creek would purify any waste and that
the squatters were probably not the cause, he was amply denounced.

"He's  a  fine  one,  he  is,  to  go around blatting that we'd ought to have more health precautions! Here we go and show him where there's some
hellhounds  that  ought  to  be  shot,  and them only Bohunks anyway, and he doesn't do a darn' thing but shoot a lot of hot air about germicidal
effect or whatever the fool thing is," remarked Kaes, the wheat-buyer at the Delft elevator.

Flashing  through the county, not neglecting but certainly not enlarging his own practice, Martin mapped every recent case of typhoid within five
miles  of  Delft.  He  looked  into  milk-routes and grocery deliveries. He discovered that most of the cases had appeared after the visits of an
itinerant seamstress, a spinster virtuous and almost painfully hygienic. She had had typhoid four years before.

"She's a chronic carrier of the bugs. She's got to be examined," he announced.

He found her sewing at the house of an old farmer-preacher.

With  modest  indignation she refused to be examined, and as he went away she could be heard weeping at the insult, while the preacher cursed him
from  the  doorstep.  He  returned  with  the township police officer and had the seamstress arrested and confined in the segregation ward of the
county poor-farm. In her discharges he found billions of typhoid bacilli.

The  frail  and  decent  body  was  not  comfortable in the board-lined whitewashed ward. She was shamed and frightened. She had always been well
beloved,  a  gentle, shabby, bright-eyed spinster who brought presents to the babies, helped the overworked farmwives to cook dinner, and sang to
the  children in her thin sparrow voice. Martin was reviled for persecuting her. "He wouldn't dare pick on her if she wasn't so poor," they said,
and they talked of a jail-delivery.

Martin fretted. He called upon the seamstress at the poor-farm, he tried to make her understand that there was no other place for her, he brought
her  magazines  and  sweets.  But he was firm. She could not go free. He was convinced that she had caused at least one hundred cases of typhoid,
with nine deaths.

The  county derided him. Cause typhoid now, when she had been well for four years? The County Commissioners and the County Board of Health called
Dr.  Hesselink  in  from  the  next  county.  He agreed with Martin and his maps. Every meeting of the Commissioners was a battle now, and it was
uncertain whether Martin would be ruined or throned.

Leora  saved  him  and the seamstress. "Why not take up a collection to send her off to some big hospital where she can be treated, or where they
can keep her if she can't be cured?" said she.

The seamstress entered a sanitarium--and was amiably forgotten by everyone for the rest of her life--and his recent enemies said of Martin, "He's
mighty  smart, and right on the job." Hesselink drove over to inform him, "You did pretty well this time, Arrowsmith. Glad to see you're settling
down to business."

Martin  was  slightly  cocky,  and  immediately bounded after a fine new epidemic. He was so fortunate as to have a case of small-pox and several
which  he  suspected.  Some  of  these  lay across the border in Mencken County, Hesselink's domain, and Hesselink laughed at him. "It's probably
chicken-pox,  except  your  one  case.  Mighty rarely you get small-pox in summer," he chuckled, while Martin raged up and down the two counties,
proclaiming the scourge, imploring everyone to be vaccinated, thundering, "There's going to be all hell let loose here in ten or fifteen days!"

But  the  United  Brethren parson, who served chapels in Wheatsylvania and two other villages, was an anti-vaccinationist and he preached against
it.  The villages sided with him. Martin went from house to house, beseeching them, offering to treat them without charge. As he had never taught
them  to  love  him and follow him as a leader, they questioned, they argued long and easily on doorsteps, they cackled that he was drunk. Though
for  weeks  his  strongest draft had been the acrid coffee of the countryside, they peeped one to another that he was drunk every night, that the
United Brethren minister was about to expose him from the pulpit.

And  ten  dreadful days went by and fifteen, and all but the first case did prove to be chicken-pox. Hesselink gloated and the village roared and
Martin was the butt of the land.

He had only a little resented their gossip about his wickedness, only in evenings of slow depression had he meditated upon fleeing from them, but
at their laughter he was black furious.

Leora comforted him with cool hands. "It'll pass over," she said. But it did not pass.

By  autumn it had become such a burlesque epic as peasants love through all the world. He had, they mirthfully related, declared that anybody who
kept  hogs  would  die  of  small-pox;  he  had been drunk for a week, and diagnosed everything from gall-stones to heart-burn as small-pox. They
greeted him, with no meaning of offense in their snickering, "Got a pimple on my chin, Doc. What is 't--small-pox?"

More  terrible  than  their rage is the people's laughter, and if it rends tyrants, with equal zest it pursues the saint and wise man and befouls
their treasure.

When  the  neighborhood  suddenly  achieved  a real epidemic of diphtheria and Martin shakily preached antitoxin, one-half of them remembered his
failure  to  save  Mary  Novak and the other half clamored, "Oh, give us a rest! You got epidemics on the brain!" That a number of children quite
adequately died did not make them relinquish their comic epic.

Then  it  was  that  Martin  came home to Leora and said quietly, "I'm licked. I've got to get out. Nothing more I can do here. Take years before
they'd trust me again. They're so damned HUMOROUS! I'm going to go get a real job--public health."

"I'm so glad! You're too good for them here. We'll find some big place where they'll appreciate your work."

"No,  that's  not fair. I've learned a little something. I've failed here. I've antagonized too many people. I didn't know how to handle them. We
could  stick it out, and I would, except that life is short and I think I'm a good worker in some ways. Been worrying about being a coward, about
running  away, 'turning my--' What is it? '--turning my hand from the plow.' I don't care now! By God, I know what I can do! Gottlieb saw it! And
I want to get to work. On we go. All right?"

"Of course!"


II


He  had read in the Journal of the American Medical Association that Gustaf Sondelius was giving a series of lectures at Harvard. He wrote asking
whether he knew of a public health appointment. Sondelius answered, in a profane and blotty scrawl, that he remembered with joy their Minneapolis
vacation,  that he disagreed with Entwisle of Harvard about the nature of metathrombin, that there was an excellent Italian restaurant in Boston,
and that he would inquire among his health-official friends as to a position.

Two days later he wrote that Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh Director of Public Health in the city of Nautilus, Iowa, was looking for a second-in--command,
and would probably be willing to send particulars.

Leora and Martin swooped on an almanac.

Gosh!  Sixty-nine  thousand  people in Nautilus! Against three hundred and sixty-six here--no, wait, it's three hundred and sixty-seven now, with
that  new baby of Pete Yeska's that the dirty swine called in Hesselink for. People! People that can talk! Theaters! Maybe concerts! Leora, we'll
be like a pair of kids let loose from school!"

He telegraphed for details, to the enormous interest of the station agent, who was also telegraph operator.

The  mimeographed  form  which  was  sent  to him said that Dr. Pickerbaugh required an assistant who would be the only full-time medical officer
besides  Pickerbaugh  himself, as the clinic and school doctors were private physicians working part-time. The assistant would be epidemiologist,
bacteriologist,  and  manager of the office clerks, the nurses, and the lay inspectors of dairies and sanitation. The salary would be twenty-five
hundred dollars a year--against the fifteen or sixteen hundred Martin was making in Wheatsylvania.

Proper recommendations were desired.

Martin wrote to Sondelius, to Dad Silva, and to Max Gottlieb, now at the McGurk Institute in New York.

Dr.  Pickerbaugh  informed  him,  "I  have  received  very  pleasant letters from Dean Silva and Dr. Sondelius about you, but the letter from Dr.
Gottlieb  is  quite  remarkable.  He  says you have rare gifts as a laboratory man. I take great pleasure in offering you the appointment; kindly
wire."

Not  till  then did Martin completely realize that he was leaving Wheatsylvania--the tedium of Bert Tozer's nagging--the spying of Pete Yeska and
the  Norbloms--the  inevitability  of  turning, as so many unchanging times he had turned, south from the Leopolis road at the Two Mile Grove and
following  again  that weary, flat, unbending trail--the superiority of Dr. Hesselink and the malice of Dr. Coughlin--the round which left him no
time for his dusty laboratory--leaving it all for the achievement and splendor of the great city of Nautilus.

"Leora, we're going! We're really going!"


III


Bert Tozer said:

"You  know by golly there's folks that would call you a traitor, after all we've done for you, even if you did pay back the thousand, to let some
other doc come in here and get all that influence away from the Family."

Ada Quist said:

"I  guess  if  you  ain't  any too popular with the folks around here you'll have one fine time in a big city like Nautilus! Well Bert and me are
going  to  get married next year and when you two swells make a failure of it I suppose we'll have to take care of you at our house when you come
sneaking  back  do you think we could get your house at the same rent you paid for it oh Bert why couldn't we take Mart's office instead it would
save money well I've always said since we were in school together you couldn't stand a decent regular life Ory."

Mr. Tozer said:

"I  simply can't understand it, with everything going so nice. Why, you'd be making three-four thousand a year some day, if you just stuck to it.
Haven't we tried to treat you nice? I don't like to have my little girl go away and leave me alone, now I'm getting on in years. And Bert gets so
cranky with me and Mother, but you and Ory would always kind of listen to us. Can't you fix it somehow so you could stay?"

Pete Yeska said:

"Doc,  you  could  of  knocked  me down with a feather when I heard you were going! Course you and me have scrapped about this drug business, but
Lord!  I  been  kind of half thinking about coming around some time and offering you a partnership and let you run the drug end to suit yourself,
and we could get the Buick agency, maybe, and work up a nice little business. I'm real sorry you're going to leave us. . . . Well, come back some
day  and we'll take a shot at the ducks, and have a good laugh about that bull you made over the smallpox. I never will forget that! I was saying
to the old woman just the other day, when she had an ear-ache, 'Ain't got smallpox, have yuh, Bess!'"

Dr. Hesselink said:

"Doctor,  what's this I hear? You're not going away? Why, you and I were just beginning to bring medical practice in this neck of the woods up to
where it ought to be, so I drove over tonight--Huh? We panned you? Ye-es, I suppose we did, but that doesn't mean we didn't appreciate you. Small
place  like here or Groningen, you have to roast your neighbors to keep busy. Why, Doctor, I've been watching you develop from an unlicked cub to
a real upstanding physician, and now you're going away--you don't know how I feel!"

Henry Novak said:

"Why,  Doc,  you  ain't going to LEAVE us? And we got a new baby coming, and I said to the woman, just the other day, 'It's a good thing we got a
doctor that hands you out the truth and not all this guff we used to get from Doc Winter.'"

The wheat-buyer at Delft said:

"Doc,  what's  this  I hear? You ain't going AWAY? A fellow told me you was and I says to him, 'Don't be more of a damn' fool than the Lord meant
you  to  be,'  I says. But I got to worrying about it, and I drove over and--Doc, I fire off my mouth pretty easy, I guess. I was agin you in the
typhoid  epidemic, when you said that seamstress was carrying the sickness around, and then you showed me up good. Doc, if you'd like to be state
senator, and if you'll stay--I got quite a little influence--believe me, I'll get out and work my shirt off for you!"

Alec Ingleblad said:

"You're a lucky guy!"

All the village was at the train when they left for Nautilus.

For a hundred autumn-blazing miles Martin mourned his neighbors. "I feel like getting off and going back. Didn't we used to have fun playing Five
Hundred  with the Fraziers! I hate to think of the kind of doctor they may get. I swear, if some quack settles there or if Woestijne neglects the
health work again, I'll go back and run 'em both out of business! And be kind of fun to be state senator, some ways."

But  as  evening  thickened  and nothing in all the rushing world existed save the yellow Pintsch gas globes above them in the long car, they saw
ahead  of  them  great  Nautilus, high honor and achievement, the making of a radiant model city and the praise of Sondelius--perhaps even of Max
Gottlieb.




Chapter 19



Midmost  of  the black-soiled Iowa plain, watered only by a shallow and insignificant creek, the city of Nautilus bakes and rattles and glistens.
For  hundreds of miles the tall corn springs in a jungle of undeviating rows, and the stranger who sweatily trudges the corn-walled roads is lost
and nervous with the sense of merciless growth.

Nautilus is to Zenith what Zenith is to Chicago.

With  seventy  thousand  people, it is a smaller Zenith but no less brisk. There is one large hotel to compare with the dozen in Zenith, but that
one is as busy and standardized and frenziedly modern as its owner can make it. The only authentic difference between Nautilus and Zenith is that
in both cases all the streets look alike but in Nautilus they do not look alike for so many miles.

The  difficulty  in  defining its quality is that no one has determined whether it is a very large village or a very small city. There are houses
with  chauffeurs  and Bacardi cocktails, but on August evenings all save a few score burghers sit in their shirt-sleeves on front porches. Across
from  the  ten-story  office building, in which a little magazine of the New Prose is published by a young woman who for five months lived in the
cafes of Montparnasse, is an old frame mansion comfortable with maples, and a line of Fords and lumber-wagons in which the overalled farmers have
come to town.

Iowa has the richest land, the lowest illiteracy rate, the largest percentages of native-born whites and motor-car owners, and the most moral and
forward-looking  cities of all the States, and Nautilus is the most Iowan city in Iowa. One out of every three persons above the age of sixty has
spent  a  winter  in  California, and among them are the champion horseshoe pitcher of Pasadena and the woman who presented the turkey which Miss
Mary Pickford, the cinema princess, enjoyed at her Christmas dinner in 1912.

Nautilus  is  distinguished by large houses with large lawns and by an astounding quantity of garages and lofty church spires. The fat fields run
up  to  the edge of the city, and the scattered factories, the innumerable railroad side-tracks, and the scraggly cottages for workmen are almost
amid  the  corn.  Nautilus  manufactures steel windmills, agricultural implements, including the celebrated Daisy Manure Spreader, and such corn-
products  as Maize Mealies, the renowned breakfast-food. It makes brick, it sells groceries wholesale, and it is the headquarters of the Cornbelt
Co-operative Insurance Company.

One of its smallest but oldest industries is Mugford Christian College, which has two hundred and seventeen students, and sixteen instructors, of
whom  eleven  are  ministers of the Church of Christ. The well-known Dr. Tom Bissex is football coach, health director, and professor of hygiene,
chemistry,  physics,  French,  and German. Its shorthand and piano departments are known far beyond the limits of Nautilus, and once, though that
was  some  years ago, Mugford held the Grinnell College baseball team down to a score of eleven to five. It has never been disgraced by squabbles
over teaching evolutionary biology--it never has thought of teaching biology at all.


II


Martin  left  Leora at the Sims House, the old-fashioned, second-best hotel in Nautilus, to report to Dr. Pickerbaugh, Director of the Department
of Public Health.

The department was on an alley, in a semi-basement at the back of that large graystone fungus, the City Hall. When he entered the drab reception-
office  he  was  highly received by the stenographer and the two visiting nurses. Into the midst of their flutterings--"Did you have a good trip,
Doctor?  Dr.  Pickerbaugh  didn't hardly expect you till tomorrow, Doctor. Is Mrs. Arrowsmith with you, Doctor?"--charged Pickerbaugh, thundering
welcomes.

Dr.  Almus  Pickerbaugh was forty-eight. He was a graduate of Mugford College and of the Wassau Medical School. He looked somewhat like President
Roosevelt,  with  the  same squareness and the same bristly mustache, and he cultivated the resemblance. He was a man who never merely talked: he
either bubbled or made orations.

He  received Martin with four "Well's," which he gave after the manner of a college cheer; he showed him through the Department, led him into the
Director's private office, gave him a cigar, and burst the dam of manly silence:

"Doctor,  I'm  delighted to have a man with your scientific inclinations. Not that I should consider myself entirely without them. In fact I make
it  a  regular  practice to set aside a period for scientific research, without a certain amount of which even the most ardent crusade for health
methods would scarcely make much headway."

It sounded like the beginning of a long seminar. Martin settled in his chair. He was doubtful about his cigar, but he found that it helped him to
look more interested.

"But  with  me, I admit, it's a matter of temperament. I have often hoped that, without any desire whatever for mere personal aggrandizement, the
powers  above  may  yet  grant me the genius to become at once the Roosevelt and the Longfellow of the great and universally growing movement for
public  health  measures  is  your  cigar  too  mild,  Doctor?  or perhaps it would be better to say the Kipling of public health rather than the
Longfellow,  because  despite the beautiful passages and high moral atmosphere of the Sage of Cambridge, his poetry lacked the swing and punch of
Kipling.

"I  assume you agree with me, or you will when you have had an opportunity to see the effect our work has on the city, and the success we have in
selling  the  idea  of  Better Health, that what the world needs is a really inspired, courageous, overtowering leader--say a Billy Sunday of the
movement--a  man  who  would know how to use sensationalism properly and wake the people out of their sloth. Sometimes the papers, and I can only
say  they  flatter  me when they compare me with Billy Sunday, the greatest of all evangelists and Christian preachers--sometimes they claim that
I'm  too  sensational.  Huh!  If  they  only could understand it, trouble is I can't be sensational enough! Still, I try, I try, and-- Look here.
Here's  a  placard,  it  was  painted  by  my  daughter  Orchid and the poetry is my own humble effort, and let me tell you it gets quoted around
everywhere:


You can't get health By a pussyfoot stealth, So let's every health-booster Crow just like a rooster.


"Then there's another--this is a minor thing; it doesn't try to drive home general abstract principles, but it'd surprise you the effect it's had
on careless housewives, who of course don't mean to neglect the health of their little ones and merely need instruction and a little pep put into
them, and when they see a card like this, it makes 'em think:


Boil the milk bottles or by gum You better buy your ticket to Kingdom Come.


"I've  gotten  quite a lot of appreciation in my small way for some of these things that didn't hardly take me five minutes to dash off. Some day
when  you  get  time, glance over this volume of clippings--just to show you, Doctor, what you can do if you go at the Movement in the up-to-date
and  scientific manner. This one, about the temperance meeting I addressed in Des Moines--say, I had that hall, and it was jam-pack-full, lifting
right  up  on  their  feet  when I proved by statistics that ninety-three per cent of all insanity is caused by booze! Then this--well, it hasn't
anything  to  do with health, directly, but it'll just indicate the opportunity you'll have here to get in touch with all the movements for civic
weal."

He  held  out  a  newspaper  clipping  in  which, above a pen-and-ink caricature portraying him with large mustached head on a tiny body, was the
headline:


DOC PICKERBAUGH BANNER BOOSTER OF EVANGELINE COUNTY LEADS BIG GO-TO-CHURCH DEMONSTRATION HERE


Pickerbaugh  looked  it over, reflecting, "That was a dandy meeting! We increased church attendance here seventeen per cent! Oh, Doctor, you went
to  Winnemac  and had your internship in Zenith, didn't you? Well, this might interest you then. It's from the Zenith Advocate-Times, and it's by
Chum  Frink, who, I think you'll agree with me, ranks with Eddie Guest and Walt Mason as the greatest, as they certainly are the most popular, of
all our poets, showing that you can bank every time on the literary taste of the American Public. Dear old Chum! That was when I was in Zenith to
address  the  national convention of Congregational Sunday-schools, I happen to be a Congregationalist myself, on 'The Morality of A1 Health.' So
Chum wrote this poem about me:"


Zenith  welcomes  with  high  hurraw A friend in Almus Pickerbaugh, The two-fisted fightin' poet doc Who stands for health like Gibraltar's rock.
He's jammed with figgers and facts and fun, The plucky old, lucky old son--of--a--gun!


For a moment the exuberant Dr. Pickerbaugh was shy.

"Maybe  it's  kind  of  immodest  in me to show that around. And when I read a poem with such originality and swing, when I find a genu-ine vest-
pocket  masterpiece like this, then I realize that I'm not a poet at all, no matter how much my jingles may serve to jazz up the Cause of Health.
My  brainchildren may teach sanitation and do their little part to save thousands of dear lives, but they aren't literature, like what Chum Frink
turns out. No, I guess I'm nothing but just a plain scientist in an office.

"Still you'll readily see how one of these efforts of mine, just by having a good laugh and a punch and some melody in it, does gild the pill and
make  careless  folks  stop  spitting on the sidewalks, and get out into God's great outdoors and get their lungs packed full of ozone and lead a
real hairy-chested he-life. In fact you might care to look over the first number of a little semi-yearly magazine I'm just starting--I know for a
fact that a number of newspaper editors are going to quote from it and so carry on the good work as well as boost my circulation."

He handed to Martin a pamphlet entitled Pickerbaugh Pickings.

In  verse  and aphorism, Pickings recommended good health, good roads, good business, and the single standard of morality. Dr. Pickerbaugh backed
up  his  injunctions  with  statistics as impressive as those the Reverend Ira Hinkley had once used at Digamma Pi. Martin was edified by an item
which  showed  that among all families divorced in Ontario, Tennessee, and Southern Wyoming in 1912, the appalling number of fifty-three per cent
of the husbands drank at least one glass of whisky daily.

Before  this  warning  had sunk in, Pickerbaugh snatched Pickings from him with a boyish, "Oh, you won't want to read any more of my rot. You can
look it over some future time. But this second volume of my clippings may perhaps interest you, just as a hint of what a fellow can do."

While  he  considered  the  headlines in the scrapbook, Martin realized that Dr. Pickerbaugh was vastly better known than he had realized. He was
exposed  as  the  founder  of  the  first  Rotary  Club in Iowa; superintendent of the Jonathan Edwards Congregational Sunday School of Nautilus;
president  of  the  Moccasin  Ski  and  Hiking  Club,  of  the  West Side Bowling Club, and the 1912 Bull Moose and Roosevelt Club; organizer and
cheerleader  of  a Joint Picnic of the Woodmen, Moose, Elks, Masons, Odd Fellows, Turnverein, Knights of Columbus, B'nai Brith, and the Y.M.C.A.;
and  winner of the prizes both for reciting the largest number of Biblical texts and for dancing the best Irish jig at the Harvest Moon Soiree of
the Jonathan Edwards Bible Class for the Grown-ups.

Martin  read  of  him  as  addressing the Century Club of Nautilus on "A Yankee Doctor's Trip Through Old Europe," and the Mugford College Alumni
Association on "Wanted: A Man-sized Feetball Coach for Old Mugford." But outside of Nautilus as well, there were loud alarums of his presence.

He  had  spoken  at  the Toledo Chamber of Commerce Weekly Luncheon on "More Health--More Bank Clearings." He had edified the National Interurban
Trolley  Council, meeting at Wichita, on "Health Maxims for Trolley Folks." Seven thousand, six hundred Detroit automobile mechanics had listened
to  his observations on "Health First, Safety Second, and Booze Nowhere A-tall." And in a great convention at Waterloo he had helped organize the
first regiment in Iowa of the Anti-rum Minute Men.

The  articles  and  editorials  regarding  him,  in newspapers, house organs, and one rubber-goods periodical, were accompanied by photographs of
himself,  his  buxom  wife,  and  his  eight  bounding daughters, depicted in Canadian winter costumes among snow and icicles, in modest but easy
athletic  costumes,  playing  tennis  in  the backyard, and in costumes of no known genus whatever, frying bacon against a background of Northern
Minnesota pines.

Martin felt strongly that he would like to get away and recover.

He  walked  back to the Sims House. He realized that to a civilized man the fact that Pickerbaugh advocated any reform would be sufficient reason
for ignoring it.

When  he had gone thus far, Martin pulled himself up, cursed himself for what he esteemed his old sin of superiority to decent normal people. . .
. Failure. Disloyalty. In medical school, in private practice, in his bullying health administration. Now again?

He urged, "This pep and heartiness stuff of Pickerbaugh's is exactly the thing to get across to the majority of people the scientific discoveries
of  the Max Gottliebs. What do I care how much Pickerbaugh gases before conventions of Sunday School superintendents and other morons, as long as
he lets me do my work in the lab and dairy inspection?"

He  pumped  up  enthusiasm and came quite cheerfully and confidently into the shabby, high-ceilinged hotel bedroom where Leora sat in a rocker by
the window.

"Well?" she said.

"It's fine--gave me fine welcome. And they want us to come to dinner tomorrow evening."

"What's he like?"

"Oh, he's awfully optimistic--he puts things over--he-- Oh, Leora, am I going to be a sour, cranky, unpopular, rotten failure again?"

His head was buried in her lap and he clung to her affection, the one reality in a world of chattering ghosts.


III


When the maples fluttered beneath their window in the breeze that sprang up with the beginning of twilight, when the amiable citizens of Nautilus
had  driven  home  to  supper in their shaky Fords, Leora had persuaded him that Pickerbaugh's flamboyance would not interfere with his own work,
that in any case they would not remain in Nautilus forever, that he was impatient, and that she loved him dearly. So they descended to supper, an
old-fashioned Iowa supper with corn fritters and many little dishes which were of interest after the loving but misinformed cooking of Leora, and
they went to the movies and held hands and were not ill content.

The next day Dr. Pickerbaugh was busier and less buoyant. He gave Martin a notion of the details of his work.

Martin had thought of himself, freed from tinkering over cut fingers and ear-aches, as spending ecstatic days in the laboratory, emerging only to
battle  with  factory-owners  who defied sanitation. But he found that it was impossible to define his work, except that he was to do a little of
everything that Pickerbaugh, the press, or any stray citizen of Nautilus might think of.

He  was to placate voluble voters who came in to complain of everything from the smell of sewer-gas to the midnight beer parties of neighbors; he
was to dictate office correspondence to the touchy stenographer, who was not a Working Girl but a Nice Girl Who Was Working; to give publicity to
the  newspapers; to buy paper-clips and floor-wax and report-blanks at the lowest prices; to assist, in need, the two part-time physicians in the
city  clinic;  to  direct the nurses and the two sanitary inspectors; to scold the Garbage Removal Company; to arrest--or at least to jaw at--all
public  spitters; to leap into a Ford and rush out to tack placards on houses in which were infectious diseases; to keep a learned implacable eye
on  epidemics  from Vladivostok to Patagonia, and to prevent (by methods not very clearly outlined) their coming in to slay the yeomanry and even
halt the business activities of Nautilus.

But there was a little laboratory work: milk tests, Wassermanns for private physicians, the making of vaccines, cultures in suspected diphtheria.

"I get it," said Leora, as they dressed for dinner at Pickerbaugh's. "Your job will only take about twenty-eight hours a day, and the rest of the
time you're perfectly welcome to spend in research, unless somebody interrupts you."


IV


The  home  of Dr. and Mrs. Almus Pickerbaugh, on the steeple-prickly West Side, was a Real Old-Fashioned Home. It was a wooden house with towers,
swings, hammocks, rather mussy shade trees, a rather mangy lawn, a rather damp arbor, and an old carriage-house with a line of steel spikes along
the ridge pole. Over the front gate was the name: UNEEDAREST.

Martin and Leora came into a shambles of salutations and daughters. The eight girls, from pretty Orchid aged nineteen to the five-year-old twins,
surged up in a tidal wave of friendly curiosity and tried to talk all at once.

Their  hostess was a plump woman with an air of worried trustfulness. Her conviction that everything was all right was constantly struggling with
her knowledge that a great many things seemed to be all wrong. She kissed Leora while Pickerbaugh was pump-handling Martin. Pickerbaugh had a way
of pressing his thumb into the back of your hand which was extraordinarily cordial and painful.

He immediately drowned out even his daughters by an oration on the Home Nest:

"Here  you've  got an illustration of Health in the Home. Look at these great strapping girls, Arrowsmith! Never been sick a day in their lives--
practically--and  though Mother does have her sick-headaches, that's to be attributed to the early neglect of her diet, because while her father,
the  old deacon--and a fine upstanding gentleman of the old school he was, too, if there ever was one, and a friend of Nathaniel Mugford, to whom
more  than  any  other we owe not only the foundation of Mugford College but also the tradition of integrity and industry which have produced our
present prosperity--BUT he had no knowledge of diet or sanitation, and I've always thought--"

The daughters were introduced as Orchid, Verbena, Daisy, Jonquil, Hibisca, Narcissa, and the twins, Arbuta and Gladiola.

Mrs. Pickerbaugh sighed:

"I  suppose it would be dreadfully conventional to call them My Jewels--I do so hate these conventional phrases that everybody uses, don't you?--
but  that's  what  they  really  are to their mother, and the Doctor and I have sometimes wished-- Of course when we'd started giving them floral
names  we  had  to  keep it up, but if we'd started with jewels, just think of all the darling names we might have used, like Agate and Cameo and
Sardonyx  and  Beryl  and  Topaz  and  Opal and Esmeralda and Chrysoprase--it IS Chrysoprase, isn't it, not Chrysalis? Oh, well, many people have
congratulated  us  on  their  names  as  it  is.  You  know  the  girls are getting quite famous--their pictures in so many papers, and we have a
Pickerbaugh Ladies' Baseball Team all our own--only the Doctor has to play on it now, because I'm beginning to get a little stout."

Except  by  their ages, it was impossible to tell the daughters apart. They were all bouncing, all blond, all pretty, all eager, all musical, and
not  merely pure but clamorously clean-minded. They all belonged to the Congregational Sunday School, and to either the Y.W.C.A. or the Camp Fire
Girls;  they  were all fond of picnicking; and they could all of them, except the five-year-old twins, quote practically without error the newest
statistics showing the evils of alcohol.

"In fact," said Dr. Pickerbaugh, "WE think they're a very striking brood of chickabiddies."

"They certainly are!" quivered Martin.

"But best of all, they are able to help me put over the doctrine of the Mens Sana in the Corpus Sano. Mrs. Pickerbaugh and I have trained them to
sing together, both in the home and publicly, and as an organization we call them the Healthette Octette."

"Really?" said Leora, when it was apparent that Martin had passed beyond speech.

"Yes, and before I get through with it I hope to popularize the name Healthette from end to end of this old nation, and you're going to see bands
of  happy  young  women  going  around  spreading  their  winged  message into every dark corner. Healthette Bands! Beautiful and pure-minded and
enthusiastic  and  good basket-ball players! I tell you, THEY'LL make the lazy and willful stir their stumps! They'll shame the filthy livers and
filthy talkers into decency! I've already worked out a poem-slogan for the Healthette Bands. Would you like to hear it?"


Winsome  young womanhood wins with a smile Boozers, spitters, and gamblers from things that are vile. Our parents and teachers have explained the
cause of life, So against the evil-minded we'll also make strife. We'll shame them, reclaim them, from bad habits, you bet! Better watch out, Mr.
Loafer, I am a Healthette!


"But  of  course  an  even  more  important Cause is--and I was one of the first to advocate it--having a Secretary of Health and Eugenics in the
cabinet at Washington--"

On the tide of this dissertation they were swept through a stupendous dinner. With a hearty "Nonsense, nonsense, man, of course you want a second
helping--this  is  Hospitality  Hall!"  Pickerbaugh  so stuffed Martin and Leora with roast duck, candied sweet potatoes, and mince pie that they
became  dangerously  ill  and  sat  glassy-eyed.  But  Pickerbaugh  himself  did not seem to be affected. While he carved and gobbled, he went on
discoursing  till the dining-room, with its old walnut buffet, its Hoffmann pictures of Christ, and its Remington pictures of cowpunchers, seemed
to vanish, leaving him on a platform beside a pitcher of ice-water.

Not  always  was he merely fantastic. "Dr. Arrowsmith, I tell you we're lucky men to be able to get a living out of doing our honest best to make
the  people in a he-town like this well and vital. I could be pulling down eight or ten thousand a year in private practice, and I've been told I
could make more than that in the art of advertising, yet I'm glad, and my dear ones are glad with me, to take a salary of four thousand. Think of
our having a job where we've got nothing to sell but honesty and decency and the brotherhood o' man!"

Martin  perceived  that  Pickerbaugh  meant  it, and the shame of the realization kept him from leaping up, seizing Leora, and catching the first
freight train out of Nautilus.

After  dinner  the younger daughters desired to love Leora, in swarms. Martin had to take the twins on his knees and tell them a story. They were
remarkably heavy twins, but no heavier than the labor of inventing a plot. Before they went to bed, the entire Healthette Octette sang the famous
Health  Hymn (written by Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh) which Martin was to hear on so many bright and active public occasions in Nautilus. It was set to
the tune of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," but as the twins' voices were energetic and extraordinarily shrill, it had an effect all its own:


Oh,  are you out for happiness or are you out for pelf? You owe it to the grand old flag to cultivate yourself, To train the mind, keep clean the
streets, and ever guard your health.

Then we'll all go marching on.

A healthy mind in A clean body, A healthy mind in A clean body, A healthy mind in A clean body, The slogan for one and all.


As a bedtime farewell, the twins then recited, as they had recently at the Congregational Festival, one of their father's minor lyrics:


What does little birdie say On the sill at break o' day? "Hurrah for health in Nautilus For Pa and Ma and all of us, Hurray, hurray, hurray!"


"There,  my popsywopsies, up to bed we go!" said Mrs. Pickerbaugh. "Don't you think, Mrs. Arrowsmith, they're natural-born actresses? They're not
afraid  of  any  audience,  and the way they throw themselves into it--perhaps not Broadway, but the more refined theaters in New York would just
love them, and maybe they've been sent to us to elevate the drama. Upsy go."

During her absence the others gave a brief musical program.

Verbena, the second oldest, played Chaminade. ("Of course we all love music, and popularize it among the neighbors, but Verby is perhaps the only
real musical genius in the family.") But the unexpected feature was Orchid's cornet solo.

Martin dared not look at Leora. It was not that he was sniffily superior to cornet solos, for in Elk Mills, Wheatsylvania, and surprisingly large
portions of Zenith, cornet solos were done by the most virtuous females. But he felt that he had been in a madhouse for dozens of years.

"I've  never  been  so  drunk in my life. I wish I could get at a drink and sober up," he agonized. He made hysterical and completely impractical
plans for escape. Then Mrs. Pickerbaugh, returning from the still audible twins, sat down at the harp.

While  she played, a faded woman and thickish, she fell into a great dreaming, and suddenly Martin had a picture of her as a gay, good, dove-like
maiden  who  had admired the energetic young medical student, Almus Pickerbaugh. She must have been a veritable girl of the late eighties and the
early nineties, the naive and idyllic age of Howells, when young men were pure, when they played croquet and sang Swanee River; a girl who sat on
a  front  porch  enchanted  by the sweetness of lilacs, and hoped that when Almus and she were married they would have a nickel-plated baseburner
stove and a son who would become a missionary or a millionaire.

For the first time that evening, Martin managed to put a respectable heartiness into his "Enjoyed that s' much." He felt victorious, and somewhat
recovered from his weakness. But the evening's orgy was only begun.

They  played  word-games, which Martin hated and Leora did very badly indeed. They acted charades, at which Pickerbaugh was tremendous. The sight
of  him on the floor in his wife's fur coat, being a seal on an ice-floe, was incomparable. Then Martin, Orchid, and Hibisca (aged twelve) had to
present a charade, and there were complications.

Orchid  was as full of simple affections, of smilings and pattings and bouncings, as her younger sisters, but she was nineteen and not altogether
a  child.  Doubtless  she  was  as  pure-minded  and  as  devoted  to Clean and Wholesome Novels as Dr. Pickerbaugh stated, and he stated it with
frequency, but she was not unconscious of young men, even though they were married.

She  planned  to enact the word doleful, with a beggar asking a dole, and a corncrib full. As they skipped upstairs to dress, she hugged Martin's
arm, frisked beside him, and murmured, "Oh, Doctor, I'm so glad Daddy has you for assistant--somebody that's young and good-looking. Oh, was that
dreadful  of me? But I mean: you look so athletic and everything, and the other assistant director--don't tell Daddy I said so, but he was an old
crank!"

He  was  conscious of brown eyes and unshadowed virginal lips. As Orchid put on her agreeably loose costume as a beggar, he was also conscious of
ankles and young bosom. She smiled at him, as one who had long known him, and said loyally, "We'll show 'em! I know you're a dan-dy actor!"

When  they  bustled  downstairs,  as she did not take his arm, he took hers, and he pressed it slightly and felt alarmed and relinquished it with
emphasis.

Since  his  marriage  he had been so absorbed in Leora, as lover, as companion, as helper, that till this hour his most devastating adventure had
been  a  glance  at  a pretty girl in a train. But the flushed young gaiety of Orchid disturbed him. He wanted to be rid of her, he hoped that he
would not be altogether rid of her, and for the first time in years he was afraid of Leora's eyes.

There  were  acrobatic  feats later, and a considerable prominence of Orchid, who did not wear stays, who loved dancing, and who praised Martin's
feats in the game of "Follow the Leader."

All  the  daughters  save  Orchid  were  sent  to  bed,  and the rest of the fete consisted of what Pickerbaugh called "a little quiet scientific
conversation  by  the fireside," made up of his observations on good roads, rural sanitation, Ideals in politics, and methods of letter filing in
health departments. Through this placid hour, or it may have been an hour and a half, Martin saw that Orchid was observing his hair, his jaw, his
hands, and he had, and dismissed, and had again a thought about the innocent agreeableness of holding her small friendly paw.

He  also saw that Leora was observing both of them, and he suffered a good deal, and had practically no benefit whatever from Pickerbaugh's notes
on  the  value  of disinfectants. When Pickerbaugh predicted for Nautilus, in fifteen years, a health department thrice as large, with many full-
time  clinic  and school physicians and possibly Martin as director (Pickerbaugh himself having gone off to mysterious and interesting activities
in  a  Larger  Field), Martin merely croaked, "Yes, that'd be--be fine," while to himself he was explaining, "Damn that girl, I wish she wouldn't
shake herself at me."

At half-past eight he had pictured his escape as life's highest ecstasy; at twelve he took leave with nervous hesitation.

They  walked  to  the  hotel. Free from the sight of Orchid, brisk in the coolness, he forgot the chit and pawed again the problem of his work in
Nautilus.

"Lord, I don't know whether I can do it. To work under that gas-bag, with his fool pieces about boozers--"

"They weren't so bad," protested Leora.

"Bad?  Why,  he's  probably  the worst poet that ever lived, and he certainly knows less about epidemiology than I thought any one man could ever
learn,  all  by  himself.  But  when  it comes to this--what was it Clif Clawson used to call it?--by the way, wonder what's ever become of Clif;
haven't heard from him for a couple o' years--when it comes to this 'overpowering Christian Domesticity'-- Oh, let's hunt for a blind-pig and sit
around with the nice restful burglars."

She insisted, "I thought his poems were kind of cute."

"Cute! What a word!"

"It's no worse than the cuss-words you're always using! But the cornet yowling by that awful oldest daughter-- Ugh!"

"Well, now she played darn' well!"

"Martin,  the  cornet is the kind of instrument my brother would play. And you so superior about the doctor's poetry and my saying 'cute'! You're
just as much a backwoods hick as I am, and maybe more so!"

"Why,  gee,  Leora,  I  never knew you to get sore about nothing before! And can't you understand how important-- You see, a man like Pickerbaugh
makes  all public health work simply ridiculous by his circusing and his ignorance. If he said that fresh air was a good thing, instead of making
me open my windows it'd make me or any other reasonable person close 'em. And to use the word 'science' in those flop-eared limericks or whatever
you call 'em--it's sacrilege!"

"Well, if you want to KNOW, Martin Arrowsmith, I'll have no more of these high jinks with that Orchid girl! Practically hugging her when you came
downstairs,  and then mooning at her all evening! I don't mind your cursing and being cranky and even getting drunk, in a reasonable sort of way,
but  ever  since  the  lunch when you told me and that Fox woman, 'I hope you girls won't mind, but I just happen to remember that I'm engaged to
both of you'-- You're mine, and I won't have any trespassers. I'm a cavewoman, and you'd better learn it, and as for that Orchid, with her simper
and her stroking your arm and her great big absurd feet-- Orchid! She's no orchid! She's a bachelor's button!"

"But, honest, I don't even remember which of the eight she was."

"Huh!  Then  you've  been making love to all of 'em, that's why. Drat her! Well, I'm not going to go on scrapping about it. I just wanted to warn
you, that's all."

At  the  hotel,  after  giving  up  the  attempt  to  find a short, jovial, convincing way of promising that he would never flirt with Orchid, he
stammered, "If you don't mind, I think I'll stay down and walk a little more. I've got to figure this health department business out."

He sat in the Sims House office--singularly dismal it was, after midnight, and singularly smelly.

"That fool Pickerbaugh! I wish I'd told him right out that we know hardly anything about the epidemiology of tuberculosis, for instance.

"Just  the  same,  she's  a darling child. Orchid! She's like an orchid--no, she's too healthy. Be a great kid to go hunting with. Sweet. And she
acted  as  if  I  were  her own age, not an old doctor. I'll be good, oh, I'll be good, but--I'd like to kiss her once, GOOD! She likes me. Those
darling lips, like--like rosebuds!

"Poor  Leora.  I  nev' was so astonished in my life. Jealous. Well, she's got a right to be! No woman ever stood by a man like--Lee, sweet, can't
you see, idiot, if I skipped round the corner with seventeen billion Orchids, it'd be you I loved, and never anybody but you!

"I  can't  go  round singing Healthette Octette Pantalette stuff. Even if it did instruct people, which it don't. Be almost better to let 'em die
than have to live and listen to--

"Leora  said  I was a 'backwoods hick.' Let me tell you, young woman, as it happens I am a Bachelor of Arts, and you may recall the kind of books
the 'backwoods hick' was reading to you last winter, and even Henry James and everybody and-- Oh, she's right. I am. I do know how to make pipets
and agar, but-- And yet some day I want to travel like Sondelius--

"Sondelius! God! If it were he I was working for, instead of Pickerbaugh, I'd slave for him--

"Or does he pull the bunk, too?

"Now that's just what I mean. That kind of phrase. 'Pull the bunk'! Horrible!

"Hell!  I'll  use  any  kind of phrase I want to! I'm not one of your social climbers like Angus. The way Sondelius cusses, for instance, and yet
he's used to all those highbrows--

"And I'll be so busy here in Nautilus that I won't even be able to go on reading. Still-- I don't suppose they read much, but there must be quite
a few of these rich men here that know about nice houses. Clothes. Theaters. That stuff.

"Rats!"

He  wandered to an all-night lunch-wagon, where he gloomily drank coffee. Beside him, seated at the long shelf which served as table, beneath the
noble red-glass window with a portrait of George Washington, was a policeman who, as he gnawed a Hamburger sandwich, demanded:

"Say, ain't you this new doctor that's come to assist Pickerbaugh? Seen you at City Hall."

"Yes.  Say,  uh,  say, how does the city like Pickerbaugh? How do you like him? Tell me honestly, because I'm just starting in, and, uh-- You get
me."

With  his  spoon  held  inside  the  cup by a brawny thumb, the policeman gulped his coffee and proclaimed, while the greasy friendly cook of the
lunch-wagon nodded in agreement:

"Well,  if  you  want  the  straight dope, he hollers a good deal, but he's one awful brainy man. He certainly can sling the Queen's English, and
jever  hear one of his poems? They're darn' bright. I'll tell you: There's some people say Pickerbaugh pulls the song and dance too much, but way
I  figure  it,  course  maybe for you and me, Doctor, it'd be all right if he just looked after the milk and the garbage and the kids' teeth. But
there's  a  lot of careless, ignorant, foreign slobs that need to be jollied into using their konks about these health biznai, so's they won't go
getting  sick with a lot of these infectious diseases and pass 'em on to the rest of us, and believe me, old Doc Pickerbaugh is the boy that gets
the idea into their noodles!

"Yes,  sir,  he's a great old coot--he ain't a clam like some of these docs. Why, say, one day he showed up at the St. Patrick picnic, even if he
is  a  dirty  Protestant,  and him and Father Costello chummed up like two old cronies, and darn' if he didn't wrestle a fellow half his age, and
awful'  near  throw him, yes, you bet he did, he certainly give that young fellow a run for his money all right! We fellows on the Force all like
him,  and  we have to grin, the way he comes around and soft-soaps us into doing a lot of health work that by law we ain't hardly supposed to do,
you might say, instead of issuing a lot of fool orders. You bet. He's a real guy."

"I see," said Martin, and as he returned to the hotel he meditated:

"But think of what Gottlieb would say about him.

"Damn Gottlieb! Damn everybody except Leora!

"I'm not going to fail here, way I did in Wheatsylvania.

"Some day Pickerbaugh will get a bigger job-- Huh! He's just the kind of jollying fourflusher that WOULD climb! But anyway, I'll have my training
then, and maybe I'll make a real health department here.

"Orchid said we'd go skating this winter--

"DAMN Orchid!"




Chapter 20



Martin  found  in  Dr.  Pickerbaugh  a  generous  chief.  He  was  eager to have Martin invent and clamor about his own Causes and Movements. His
scientific  knowledge  was rather thinner than that of the visiting nurses, but he had little jealousy, and he demanded of Martin only the belief
that a rapid and noisy moving from place to place is the means (and possibly the end) of Progress.

In  a two-family house on Social Hill, which is not a hill but a slight swelling in the plain, Martin and Leora found an upper floor. There was a
simple pleasantness in these continuous lawns, these wide maple-shaded streets, and a joy in freedom from the peering whispers of Wheatsylvania.

Suddenly they were being courted by the Nice Society of Nautilus.

A few days after their arrival Martin was summoned to the telephone to hear a masculine voice rasping:

"Hello. Martin? I bet you can't guess who this is!"

Martin, very busy, restrained his desire to observe, "You win--g' by!" and he buzzed, with the cordiality suitable to a new Assistant Director:

"No, I'm afraid I can't."

"Well, make a guess."

"Oh--Clif Clawson?"

"Nope. Say, I see you're looking fine. Oh, I guess I've got you guessing this time! Go on! Have another try!"

The stenographer was waiting to take letters, and Martin had not yet learned to become impersonal and indifferent in her presence. He said with a
perceptible tartness:

"Oh, I suppose it's President Wilson. Look here--"

"Well, Mart, it's Irve Watters! What do you know about that!"

Apparently  the  jester expected large gratification, but it took ten seconds for Martin to remember who Irving Watters might be. Then he had it:
Watters,  the  appalling  normal  medical  student  whose faith in the good, the true, the profitable, had annoyed him at Digamma Pi. He made his
response as hearty as he could:

"Well, well, what you doing here, Irve?"

"Why,  I'm  settled  here. Been here ever since internship. And got a nice little practice, too. Look, Mart, Mrs. Watters and I want you and your
wife--I believe you are married, aren't you?--to come up to the house for dinner, tomorrow evening, and I'll put you onto all the local slants."

The dread of Watters's patronage enabled Martin to lie vigorously:

"Awfully sorry--awfully sorry--got a date for tomorrow evening and the next evening."

"Then come have lunch with me tomorrow at the Elks' Club, and you and your wife take dinner with us Sunday noon."

Hopelessly, "I don't think I can make it for lunch but-- Well, we'll dine with you Sunday."

It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends. Martin's
imaginative  dismay at being caught here by Watters was not lessened when Leora and he reluctantly appeared on Sunday at one-thirty and were by a
fury of Old Friendship dragged back into the days of Digamma Pi.

Watters's  house  was  new, and furnished in a highly built-in and leaded-glass manner. He had in three years of practice already become didactic
and  incredibly married; he had put on weight and infallibility; and he had learned many new things about which to be dull. Having been graduated
a  year  earlier  than  Martin  and  having married an almost rich wife, he was kind and hospitable with an emphasis which aroused a desire to do
homicide. His conversation was a series of maxims and admonitions:

"If  you  stay  with the Department of Public Health for a couple of years and take care to meet the right people, you'll be able to go into very
lucrative practice here. It's a fine town--prosperous--so few dead beats.

"You want to join the country club and take up golf. Best opportunity in the world to meet the substantial citizens. I've picked up more than one
high-class patient there.

"Pickerbaugh  is  a  good active man and a fine booster but he's got a bad socialistic tendency. These clinics--outrageous--the people that go to
them  that  can  afford  to  pay! Pauperize people. Now this may startle you--oh, you had a lot of crank notions when you were in school, but you
aren't  the  only  one that does some thinking for himself!--sometimes I believe it'd be better for the general health situation if there weren't
any  public health departments at all, because they get a lot of people into the habit of going to free clinics instead of to private physicians,
and cut down the earnings of the doctors and reduce their number, so there are less of us to keep a watchful eye on sickness.

"I guess by this time you've gotten over the funny ideas you used to have about being practical--'commercialism' you used to call it. You can see
now that you've got to support your wife and family, and if you don't, nobody else is going to.

"Any  time  you  want a straight tip about people here, you just come to me. Pickerbaugh is a crank--he won't give you the right dope--the people
you want to tie up with are the good, solid, conservative, successful business men."

Then  Mrs.  Watters  had  her turn. She was meaty with advice, being the daughter of a prosperous person, none other than Mr. S. A. Peaseley, the
manufacturer of the Daisy Manure Spreader.

"You  haven't  any  children?" she sobbed at Leora. "Oh, you must! Irving and I have two, and you don't know what an interest they are to us, and
they keep us so young."

Martin and Leora looked at each other pitifully.

After dinner, Irving insisted on their recalling the "good times we used to have together at the dear old U." He took no denial. "You always want
to  make  folks  think  you're eccentric, Mart. You pretend you haven't any college patriotism, but I know better--I know you're showing off--you
admire  the  old place and our profs just as much as anybody. Maybe I know you better than you do yourself! Come on, now; let's give a long cheer
and sing 'Winnemac, Mother of Brawny Men.'"

And, "Don't be silly; of course you're going to sing," said Mrs. Watters, as she marched to the piano, with which she dealt in a firm manner.

When  they  had politely labored through the fried chicken and brick ice cream, through the maxims, gurglings and memories, Martin and Leora went
forth and spoke in tongues:

"Pickerbaugh must be a saint, if Watters roasts him. I begin to believe he has sense enough to come in when it rains."

In their common misery they forgot that they had been agitated by a girl named Orchid.

Part Two of Arrowsmith