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

Part One of Arrowsmith

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II


Between Pickerbaugh and Irving Watters, Martin was drafted into many of the associations, clubs, lodges, and "causes" with which Nautilus foamed;
into the Chamber of Commerce, the Moccasin Ski and Hiking Club, the Elks' Club, the Odd Fellows, and the Evangeline County Medical society. He
resisted, but they said in a high hurt manner, "Why, my boy, if you're going to be a public official, and if you have the slightest appreciation
of their efforts to make you welcome here--"

Leora and he found themselves with so many invitations that they, who had deplored the dullness of Wheatsylvania, complained now that they could
have no quiet evenings at home. But they fell into the habit of social ease, of dressing, of going places without nervous anticipation. They
modernized their rustic dancing; they learned to play bridge, rather badly, and tennis rather well; and Martin, not by virtue and heroism but
merely by habit, got out of the way of resenting the chirp of small talk.

Probably they were never recognized by their hostesses as pirates, but considered a Bright Young Couple who, since they were proteges of
Pickerbaugh, must be earnest and forward-looking, and who, since they were patronized by Irving and Mrs. Watters, must be respectable.

Watters took them in hand and kept them there. He had so thick a rind that it was impossible for him to understand that Martin's frequent
refusals of his invitations could conceivably mean that he did not wish to come. He detected traces of heterodoxy in Martin, and with affection,
diligence, and an extraordinarily heavy humor he devoted himself to the work of salvation. Frequently he sought to entertain other guests by
urging, "Come on now, Mart, let's hear some of those crazy ideas of yours!"

His friendly zeal was drab compared with that of his wife. Mrs. Watters had been reared by her father and by her husband to believe that she was
the final fruit of the ages, and she set herself to correct the barbarism of the Arrowsmiths. She rebuked Martin's damns, Leora's smoking, and
both their theories of bidding at bridge. But she never nagged. To have nagged would have been to admit that there were persons who did not
acknowledge her sovereignty. She merely gave orders, brief, humorous, and introduced by a strident "Now don't be silly," and she expected that to
settle the matter.

Martin groaned, "Oh, Lord, between Pickerbaugh and Irve, it's easier to become a respectable member of society than to go on fighting."

But Watters and Pickerbaugh were not so great a compulsion to respectability as the charms of finding himself listened to in Nautilus as he never
had been in Wheatsylvania, and of finding himself admired by Orchid.


III


He had been seeking a precipitation test for the diagnosis of syphilis which should be quicker and simpler than the Wassermann. His slackened
fingers and rusty mind were becoming used to the laboratory and to passionate hypotheses when he was dragged away to help Pickerbaugh in securing
publicity. He was coaxed into making his first speech: an address on "What the Laboratory Teaches about Epidemics" for the Sunday Afternoon Free
Lecture Course of the Star of Hope Universalist Church.

He was flustered when he tried to prepare his notes, and on the morning of the affair he was chill as he remembered the dreadful thing he would
do this day, but he was desperate with embarrassment when he came up to the Star of Hope Church.

People were crowding in; mature, responsible people. He quaked, "They're coming to hear ME, and I haven't got a darn' thing to say to 'em!" It
made him feel the more ridiculous that they who presumably wished to listen to him should not be aware of him, and that the usher, profusely
shaking hands at the Byzantine portal, should bluster, "You'll find plenty room right up the side aisles, young man."

"I'm the speaker for the afternoon."

"Oh, oh, yes, oh, yes, Doctor. Right round to the Bevis Street entrance, if you please, Doctor."

In the parlors he was unctuously received by the pastor and a committee of three, wearing morning clothes and a manner of Christian
intellectuality.

They held his hand in turn, they brought up rustling women to meet him, they stood about him in a polite and twittery circle, and dismayingly
they expected him to say something intelligent. Then, suffering, ghastly frightened, dumb, he was led through an arched doorway into the
auditorium. Millions of faces were staring at his apologetic insignificance--faces in the curving lines of pews, faces in the low balcony, eyes
which followed him and doubted him and noted that his heels were run down.

The agony grew while he was prayed over and sung over.

The pastor and the lay chairman of the Lecture Course opened with suitable devotions. While Martin trembled and tried to look brazenly at the
massed people who were looking at him, while he sat nude and exposed and unprotected on the high platform, the pastor made announcement of the
Thursday Missionary Supper and the Little Lads' Marching Club. They sang a brief cheerful hymn or two--Martin wondering whether to sit or stand--
and the chairman prayed that "our friend who will address us today may have power to put his Message across." Through the prayer Martin sat with
his forehead in his hand, feeling foolish, and raving, "I guess this is the proper attitude--they're all gawping at me--gosh, won't he ever
quit?--oh, damn it, now what was that point I was going to make about fumigation?--oh, Lord, he's winding up and I've got to shoot!"

Somehow, he was standing by the reading-desk, holding it for support, and his voice seemed to be going on, producing reasonable words. The blur
of faces cleared and he saw individuals. He picked out a keen old man and tried to make him laugh and marvel.

He found Leora, toward the back, nodding to him, reassuring him. He dared to look away from the path of faces directly in front of him. He
glanced at the balcony--

The audience perceived a young man who was being earnest about sera and vaccines but, while his voice buzzed on, that churchly young man had
noted two silken ankles distinguishing the front row of the balcony, had discovered that they belonged to Orchid Pickerbaugh and that she was
flashing down admiration.

At the end Martin had the most enthusiastic applause ever known--all lecturers, after all lectures, are gratified by that kind of applause--and
the chairman said the most flattering things ever uttered, and the audience went out with the most remarkable speed ever witnessed, and Martin
discovered himself holding Orchid's hand in the parlors while she warbled, in the most adorable voice ever heard, "Oh, Dr. Arrowsmith, you were
just wonderful! Most of these lecturers are old stuffs, but you put it right over! I'm going to do a dash home and tell Dad. He'll be so
tickled!"

Not till then did he find that Leora had made her way to the parlors and was looking at them like a wife.

As they walked home Leora was eloquently silent.

"Well, did you like my spiel?" he said, after a suitable time of indignant waiting.

"Yes, it wasn't bad. It must have been awfully hard to talk to all those stupid people."

"Stupid? What d'you mean by 'stupid'? They got me splendidly. They were fine."

"Were they? Well anyway, thank Heaven, you won't have to keep up this silly gassing. Pickerbaugh likes to hear himself talk too well to let you
in on it very often."

"I didn't mind it. Fact, don't know but what it's a good thing to have to express myself publicly now and then. Makes you think more lucidly."

"As for instance the nice, lovely, lucid politicians!"

"Now you look here, Lee! Of course we know your husband is a mutt, and no good outside the laboratory, but I do think you might PRETEND to be a
little enthusiastic over the first address he's ever made--the very first he's ev-er tackled--when it went off so well."

"Why, silly, I was enthusiastic. I applauded a lot. I thought you were terribly smart. It's just-- There's other things I think you can do
better. What shall we do tonight; have a cold snack at home or go to the cafeteria?"

Thus was he reduced from hero to husband, and he had all the pleasures of inappreciation.

He thought about his indignities the whole week, but with the coming of winter there was a fever of dully sprightly dinners and safely wild
bridge and their first evening at home, their first opportunity for secure and comfortable quarreling, was on Friday. They sat down to what he
announced as "getting back to some real reading, like physiology and a little of this fellow Arnold Bennett--nice quiet reading," but which
consisted of catching up on the news notes in the medical journals.

He was restless. He threw down his magazine. He demanded:

"What're you going to wear at Pickerbaugh's snow picnic tomorrow?"

"Oh, I haven't-- I'll find something."

"Lee, I want to ask you: Why the devil did you say I talked too much at Dr. Strafford's last evening? I know I've got most of the faults going,
but I didn't know talking too much was one of 'em."

"It hasn't been, till now."

"'Till now'!"

"You look here, Sandy Arrowsmith! You've been pouting like a bad brat all week. What's the matter with you?"

"Well, I-- Gosh, it makes me tired! Here everybody is so enthusiastic about my Star of Hope spiel--that note in the Morning Frontiersman, and
Pickerbaugh says Orchid said it was a corker--and you never so much as peep!"

"Didn't I applaud? But-- It's just that I hope you aren't going to keep up this drooling."

"You do, do you! Well, let me tell you I AM going to keep it up! Not that I'm going to talk a lot of hot air. I gave 'em straight science, last
Sunday, and they ate it up. I hadn't realized it isn't necessary to be mushy, to hold an audience. And the amount of good you can do! Why, I got
across more Health Instruction and ideas about the value of the lab in that three-quarters of an hour than-- I don't care for being a big gun but
it's fine to have people where they have to listen to what you've got to say and can't butt in, way they did in Wheatsylvania. You bet I'm going
to keep up what you so politely call my damn' fool drooling--"

"Sandy, it may be all right for some people, but not for you. I can't tell you--that's one reason I haven't said more about your talk--I can't
tell you how astonished I am to hear you, who're always sneering at what you call sentimentality, simply weeping over the Dear Little Tots!"

"I never said that--never used the phrase and you know it. And by God! YOU talk about sneering! Just let me tell you that the Public Health
Movement, by correcting early faults in children, by looking after their eyes and tonsils and so on, can save millions of lives and make a future
generation--"

"I know it! I love children much more than you do! But I mean all this ridiculous simpering--"

"Well, gosh, somebody has to do it. You can't work with people till you educate 'em. There's where old Pick, even if he is an imbecile, does such
good work with his poems and all that stuff. Prob'ly be a good thing if I could write 'em--golly, wonder if I couldn't learn to?"

"They're horrible!"

"Now there's a fine consistency for you! The other evening you called 'em 'cute.'"

"I don't have to be consistent. I'm a mere woman. You, Martin Arrowsmith, you'd be the first to tell me so. And for Dr. Pickerbaugh they're all
right, but not for you. You belong in a laboratory, finding out things, not advertising them. Do you remember once in Wheatsylvania for five
minutes you almost thought of joining a church and being a Respectable Citizen? Are you going on for the rest of your life, stumbling into
respectability and having to be dug out again? Will you never learn you're a barbarian?"

"By God, I am! And--what was that other lovely thing you called me?--I'm also, soul of my soul, a damn' backwoods hick! And a fine lot you help!
When I want to settle down to a decent and useful life and not go 'round antagonizing people, you, the one that ought to believe in me, you're
the first one to crab!"

"Maybe Orchid Pickerbaugh would help you better."

"She probably would! Believe me, she's a darling, and she did appreciate my spiel at the church, and if you think I'm going to sit up all night
listening to you sneering at my work and my friends-- I'm going to have a hot bath. Good NIGHT!"

In the bath he gasped that it was impossible he should have been quarreling with Leora. Why! She was the only person in the world, besides
Gottlieb and Sondelius and Clif Clawson--by the way, where was Clif? still in New York? didn't Clif owe him a letter? but anyway-- He was a fool
to have lost his temper, even if she was so stubborn that she wouldn't adjust her opinions, couldn't see that he had a gift for influencing
people. Nobody would ever stand by him as she had, and he loved her--

He dried himself violently; he dashed in with repentances; they told each other that they were the most reasonable persons living; they kissed
with eloquence; and then Leora reflected:

"Just the same, my lad, I'm not going to help you fool yourself. You're not a booster. You're a lie-hunter. Funny, you'd think to hear about
these lie-hunters, like Professor Gottlieb and your old Voltaire, they couldn't be fooled. But maybe they were like you: always trying to get
away from the tiresome truth, always hoping to settle down and be rich, always selling their souls to the devil and then going and doublecrossing
the poor devil. I think--I think--" She sat up in bed, holding her temples in the labor of articulation. "You're different from Professor
Gottlieb. He never makes mistakes or wastes time on--"

"He wasted time at Hunziker's nostrum factory all right, and his title is 'Doctor,' not 'Professor,' if you MUST give him a--"

"If he went to Hunziker's he had some good reason. He's a genius; he couldn't be wrong. Or could he, even he? But ANYWAY: you, Sandy, you have to
stumble every so often; have to learn by making mistakes. I will say one thing: you learn from your crazy mistakes. But I get a little tired,
sometimes, watching you rush up and put your neck in every noose--like being a blinking orator or yearning over your Orchid."

"Well, by golly! After I come in here trying to make peace! It's a good thing YOU never make any mistakes! But one perfect person in a household
is enough!"

He banged into bed. Silence. Soft sounds of "Mart--SANDY!" He ignored her, proud that he could be hard with her, and so fell asleep. At
breakfast, when he was ashamed and eager, she was curt.

"I don't care to discuss it," she said.

In that wry mood they went on Saturday afternoon to the Pickerbaughs' snow picnic.


IV


Dr. Pickerbaugh owned a small log cabin in a scanty grove of oaks among the hillocks north of Nautilus. A dozen of them drove out in a bob-sled
filled with straw and blue woolly robes. The sleigh bells were exciting and the children leaped out to run beside the sled.

The school physician, a bachelor, was attentive to Leora; twice he tucked her in, and that, for Nautilus, was almost compromising. In jealousy
Martin turned openly and completely to Orchid.

He grew interested in her not for the sake of disciplining Leora but for her own rosy sweetness. She was wearing a tweed jacket, with a tam, a
flamboyant scarf, and the first breeches any girl had dared to display in Nautilus. She patted Martin's knee, and when they rode behind the sled
on a perilous toboggan, she held his waist, resolutely.

She was calling him "Dr. Martin" now, and he had come to a warm "Orchid."

At the cabin there was a clamor of disembarkation. Together Martin and Orchid carried in the hamper of food; together they slid down the hillocks
on skiis. When their skiis were entangled, they rolled into a drift, and as she clung to him, unafraid and unembarrassed, it seemed to him that
in the roughness of tweeds she was but the softer and more wonderful--eyes fearless, cheeks brilliant as she brushed the coating of wet snow from
them, flying legs of a slim boy, shoulders adorable in their pretense of sturdy boyishness--

But "I'm a sentimental fool! Leora was right!" he snarled at himself. "I thought you had some originality! And poor little Orchid--she'd be
shocked if she knew how sneak-minded you are!"

But poor little Orchid was coaxing, "Come on, Dr. Martin, let's shoot off that high bluff. We're the only ones that have any pep."

"That's because we're the only young ones."

"It's because you're so young. I'm dreadfully old. I just sit and moon when you rave about your epidemics and things."

He saw that, with her infernal school physician, Leora was sliding on a distant slope. It may have been pique and it may have been relief that he
was licensed to be alone with Orchid, but he ceased to speak to her as though she were a child and he a person laden with wisdom; ceased to speak
to her as though he were looking over his shoulder. They raced to the high bluff. They skied down it and fell; they had one glorious swooping
slide, and wrestled in the snow.

They returned to the cabin together, to find the others away. She stripped off her wet sweater and patted her soft blouse. They ferreted out a
thermos of hot coffee, and he looked at her as though he was going to kiss her, and she looked back at him as though she did not mind. As they
laid out the food they hummed with the intimacy of understanding, and when she trilled, "Now hurry up, lazy one, and put those cups on that
horrid old table," it was as one who was content to be with him forever.

They said nothing compromising, they did not hold hands, and as they rode home in the electric snow-flying darkness, though they sat shoulder by
shoulder he did not put his arms about her except when the bob-sled slewed on sharp corners. If Martin was exalted with excitement, it was
presumably caused by the wholesome exercises of the day. Nothing happened and nobody looked uneasy. At parting all their farewells were cheery
and helpful.

And Leora made no comments, though for a day or two there was about her a chill air which the busy Martin did not investigate.




Chapter 21



Nautilus was one of the first communities in the country to develop the Weeks habit, now so richly grown that we have Correspondence School Week,
Christian Science Week, Osteopathy Week, and Georgia Pine Week.

A Week is not merely a week.

If an aggressive, wide-awake, live-wire, and go-ahead church or chamber of commerce or charity desires to improve itself, which means to get more
money, it calls in those few energetic spirits who run any city, and proclaims a Week. This consists of one month of committee meetings, a
hundred columns of praise for the organization in the public prints, and finally a day or two on which athletic persons flatter inappreciative
audiences in churches or cinema theaters, and the prettiest girls in town have the pleasure of being allowed to talk to male strangers on the
street corners, apropos of giving them extremely undecorative tags in exchange for the smallest sums which those strangers think they must pay if
they are to be considered gentlemen.

The only variation is the Weeks in which the object is not to acquire money immediately by the sale of tags but by general advertising to get
more of it later.

Nautilus had held a Pep Week, during which a race of rapidly talking men, formerly book-agents but now called Efficiency Engineers, went about
giving advice to shopkeepers on how to get money away from one another more rapidly, and Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh addressed a prayer-meeting on "The
Pep of St. Paul, the First Booster." It had held a Glad-hand Week, when everybody was supposed to speak to at least three strangers daily, to the
end that infuriated elderly traveling salesmen were back-slapped all day long by hearty and powerful unknown persons. There had also been an Old
Home Week, a Write to Mother Week, a We Want Your Factory in Nautilus Week, an Eat More Corn Week, a Go to Church Week, a Salvation Army Week,
and an Own Your Own Auto Week.

Perhaps the bonniest of all was Y. Week, to raise eighty thousand dollars for a new Y.M.C.A. building.

On the old building were electric signs, changed daily, announcing "You Must Come Across," "Young Man Come Along" and "Your Money Creates
'Appiness." Dr. Pickerbaugh made nineteen addresses in three days, comparing the Y.M.C.A. to the Crusaders, the Apostles, and the expeditions of
Dr. Cook--who, he believed, really had discovered the North Pole. Orchid sold three hundred and nineteen Y. tags, seven of them to the same man,
who afterward made improper remarks to her. She was rescued by a Y.M.C.A. secretary, who for a considerable time held her hand to calm her.

No organization could rival Almus Pickerbaugh in the invention of Weeks.

He started in January with a Better Babies Week, and a very good Week it was, but so hotly followed by Banish the Booze Week, Tougher Teeth Week,
and Stop the Spitter Week that people who lacked his vigor were heard groaning, "My health is being ruined by all this fretting over health."

During Clean-up Week, Pickerbaugh spread abroad a new lyric of his own composition:


Germs come by stealth And ruin health, So listen, pard, Just drop a card To some man who'll clean up your yard And that will hit the old germs
hard.


Swat the Fly Week brought him, besides the joy of giving prizes to the children who had slaughtered the most flies, the inspiration for two
verses. Posters admonished:


Sell your hammer and buy a horn, But hang onto the old fly-swatter. If you don't want disease sneaking into the Home Then to kill the fly you
gotter!


It chanced that the Fraternal Order of Eagles were holding a state convention at Burlington that week, and Pickerbaugh telegraphed to them:


Just mention fly-prevention At the good old Eagles' convention.


This was quoted in ninety-six newspapers, including one in Alaska, and waving the clippings Pickerbaugh explained to Martin, "Now you see the way
a fellow can get the truth across, if he goes at it right."

Three Cigars a Day Week, which Pickerbaugh invented in midsummer, was not altogether successful, partly because an injudicious humorist on a
local newspaper wanted to know whether Dr. Pickerbaugh really expected all babes in arms to smoke as many as three cigars a day, and partly
because the cigar-manufacturers came around to the Department of Health with strong remarks about Common Sense. Nor was there thorough
satisfaction in Can the Cat and Doctor the Dog Week.

With all his Weeks, Pickerbaugh had time to preside over the Program Committee of the State Convention of Health Officers and Agencies.

It was he who wrote the circular letter sent to all members:


Brother Males and Shemales:

Are you coming to the Health Bee? It will be the livest Hop-to-it that this busy lil ole planet has ever see. And it's going to be Practical.
We'll kiss out on all these glittering generalities and get messages from men as kin talk, so we can lug a think or two (2) home wid us.

Luther Botts, the famous community-sing leader, will be there to put Wim an Wigor neverything into the program. John F. Zeisser, M.A., M.D., nail
the rest of the alphabet (part your hair Jack and look cute, the ladies will love you) will unlimber a coupla key-notes. (On your tootsies,
fellers, thar she blows!) From time to time, if the brakes hold, we will, or shall in the infinitive, hie oursellufs from wherein we are at to
thither, and grab a lunch with Wild Wittles.

Do it sound like a good show? It do! Barber, you're next. Let's have those cards saying you're coming.


This created much enthusiasm and merriment. Dr. Feesons of Clinton wrote to Pickerbaugh:


I figure it was largely due to your snappy come-on letter that we pulled such an attendance and with all modesty I think we may say it was the
best health convention ever held in the world. I had to laugh at one old hen, Bostonian or somepun, who was howling that your letter was
"undignified"! Can you beat it! I think people as hypercritical and lacking in humor as her should be treated with the dignified contempt they
deserve, the damn fool!


II


Martin was enthusiastic during Better Babies Week. Leora and he weighed babies, examined them, made out diet charts, and in each child saw the
baby they could never have. But when it came to More Babies Week, then he was argumentative. He believed, he said, in birth-control. Pickerbaugh
answered with theology, violence, and the example of his own eight beauties.

Martin was equally unconvinced by Anti-Tuberculosis Week. He liked his windows open at night and he disliked men who spat tobacco juice on
sidewalks, but he was jarred by hearing these certainly esthetic and possibly hygienic reforms proposed with holy frenzy and bogus statistics.

Any questioning of his fluent figures about tuberculosis, any hint that the cause of decline in the disease may have been natural growth of
immunity and not the crusades against spitting and stale air, Pickerbaugh regarded as a criticism of his honesty in making such crusades. He had
the personal touchiness of most propagandists; he believed that because he was sincere, therefore his opinions must always be correct. To demand
that he be accurate in his statements, to quote Raymond Pearl's dictum: "As a matter of objective scientific fact, extremely little is known
about why the mortality from tuberculosis has declined"--this was to be a scoundrel who really liked to befoul the pavements.

Martin was so alienated that he took an anti-social and probably vicious joy in discovering that though the death-rate in tuberculosis certainly
had decreased during Pickerbaugh's administration in Nautilus, it had decreased at the same rate in most villages of the district, with no
speeches about spitting, no Open Your Windows parades.

It was fortunate for Martin that Pickerbaugh did not expect him to take much share in his publicity campaigns, but rather to be his substitute in
the office during them. They stirred in Martin the most furious and complicated thoughts that had ever afflicted him.

Whenever he hinted criticism, Pickerbaugh answered, "What if my statistics aren't always exact? W'hat if my advertising, my jollying of the
public, does strike some folks as vulgar? It all does good; it's all on the right side. No matter what methods we use, if we can get people to
have more fresh air and cleaner yards and less alcohol, we're justified."

To himself, a little surprised, Martin put it, "Yes, does it really matter? Does truth matter--clean, cold, unfriendly truth, Max Gottlieb's
truth? Everybody says, 'Oh, you mustn't tamper with the truth,' and everybody is furious if you hint that they themselves are tampering with it.
Does anything matter, except making love and sleeping and eating and being flattered?

"I think truth does matter to me, but if it does, isn't the desire for scientific precision simply my hobby, like another man's excitement about
his golf? Anyway, I'm going to stick by Pickerbaugh."

To the defense of his chief he was the more impelled by the attitude of Irving Watters and such other physicians as attacked Pickerbaugh because
they feared that he really would be successful, and reduce their earnings. But all the while Martin was weary of unchecked statistics.

He estimated that according to Pickerbaugh's figures on bad teeth, careless motoring, tuberculosis, and seven other afflictions alone, every
person in the city had a one hundred and eighty per cent chance of dying before the age of sixteen and he could not startle with much alarm when
Pickerbaugh shouted, "Do you realize that the number of people who died from yaws in Pickens County, Mississippi, last year alone, was twenty-
nine and that they might all have been saved, yes, sir, SAVED, by a daily cold shower?"

For Pickerbaugh had the dreadful habit of cold showers, even in winter, though he might have known that nineteen men between the ages of
seventeen and forty-two died of cold showers in twenty-two years in Milwaukee alone.

To Pickerbaugh the existence of "variables," a word which Martin now used as irritatingly as once he had used "control," was without
significance. That health might be determined by temperature, heredity, profession, soil, natural immunity, or by anything save health-department
campaigns for increased washing and morality, was to him inconceivable

"Variables! Huh!" Pickerbaugh snorted. "Why, every enlightened man in the public service KNOWS enough about the causes of disease--matter now of
acting on that knowledge."

When Martin sought to show that they certainly knew very little about the superiority of fresh air to warmth in schools, about the hygienic
dangers of dirty streets about the real danger of alcohol, about the value of face-masks in influenza epidemics, about most of the things they
tub-thumped in their campaigns, Pickerbaugh merely became angry, and Martin wanted to resign, and saw Irving Watters again, and returned to
Pickerbaugh with new zeal, and was in general as agitated and wretched as a young revolutionist discovering the smugness of his leaders.

He came to question what Pickerbaugh called "the proven practical value" of his campaigns as much as the accuracy of Pickerbaugh's biology. He
noted how bored were most of the newspapermen by being galvanized into a new saving of the world once a fortnight, and how incomparably bored was
the Man in the Street when the nineteenth pretty girl in twenty days had surged up demanding that he buy a tag to support an association of which
he had never heard.

But more dismaying was the slimy trail of the dollar which he beheld in Pickerbaugh's most ardent eloquence.

When Martin suggested that all milk should be pasteurized, that certain tenements known to be tuberculosis-breeders should be burnt down instead
of being fumigated in a fiddling useless way, when he hinted that these attacks would save more lives than ten thousand sermons and ten years of
parades by little girls carrying banners and being soaked by the rain, then Pickerbaugh worried, "No, no, Martin, don't think we could do that.
Get so much opposition from the dairymen and the landlords. Can't accomplish anything in this work unless you keep from offending people."

When Pickerbaugh addressed a church or the home circle he spoke of "the value of health in making life more joyful," but when he addressed a
business luncheon he changed it to "the value in good round dollars and cents of having workmen who are healthy and sober, and therefore able to
work faster at the same wages." Parents' associations he enlightened upon "the saving in doctors' bills of treating the child before
maladjustments go too far,' but to physicians he gave assurance that public health agitation would merely make the custom of going regularly to
doctors more popular.

To Martin, he spoke of Pasteur, George Washington, Victor Vaughan, and Edison as his masters, but in asking the business men of Nautilus--the
Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce, the association of wholesalers--for their divine approval of more funds for his department, he made it
clear that they were his masters and lords of all the land, and fatly, behind cigars, they accepted their kinghood.

Gradually Martin's contemplation moved beyond Almus Pickerbaugh to all leaders, of armies or empires, of universities or churches, and he saw
that most of them were Pickerbaughs. He preached to himself, as Max Gottlieb had once preached to him, the loyalty of dissent, the faith of being
very doubtful, the gospel of not bawling gospels, the wisdom of admitting the probable ignorance of one's self and of everybody else, and the
energetic acceleration of a Movement for going very slow.


III


A hundred interruptions took Martin out of his laboratory. He was summoned into the reception-room of the department to explain to angry citizens
why the garage next door to them should smell of gasoline; he went back to his cubbyhole to dictate letters to school-principals about dental
clinics; he drove out to Swede Hollow to see what attention the food and dairy inspector had given to the slaughterhouses; he ordered a family in
Shantytown quarantined; and escaped at last into the laboratory.

It was well lighted, convenient, well stocked. Martin had little time for anything but cultures, blood-tests, and Wassermanns for the private
physicians of the city, but the work rested him, and now and then he struggled over a precipitation test which was going to replace Wassermanns
and make him famous.

Pickerbaugh apparently believed that this research would take six weeks; Martin had hoped to do it in two years; and with the present
interruptions it would require two hundred, by which time the Pickerbaughs would have eradicated syphilis and made the test useless.

To Martin's duties was added the entertainment of Leora in the strange city of Nautilus.

"Do you manage to keep busy all day?" he encouraged her, and, "Any place you'd like to go this evening?"

She looked at him suspiciously. She was as easily and automatically contented by herself as a pussy cat, and he had never before worried about
her amusement.


IV


The Pickerbaugh daughters were always popping into Martin's laboratory. The twins broke test-tubes, and made doll tents out of filter paper.
Orchid lettered the special posters for her father's Weeks, and the laboratory, she said, was the quietest place in which to work. While Martin
stood at his bench he was conscious of her, humming at a table in the corner. They talked, tremendously, and he listened with fatuous enthusiasm
to opinions which, had Leora produced them, he would have greeted with "That's a damn' silly remark!"

He held a clear, claret-red tube of hemolyzed blood up to the light, thinking half of its color and half of Orchid's ankles as she bent over the
table, absurdly patient with her paintbrushes, curling her legs in a fantastic knot.

Absurdly he asked her, "Look here, honey. Suppose you--suppose a kid like you were to fall in love with a married man. What d'you think she ought
to do? Be nice to him? Or chuck him?"

"Oh, she ought to chuck him. No matter how much she suffered. Even if she liked him terribly. Because even if she liked him, she oughtn't to
wrong his wife."

"But suppose the wife never knew, or maybe didn't care?" He had stopped his pretense of working; he was standing before her, arms akimbo, dark
eyes demanding.

"Well, if she didn't know-- But it isn't that. I believe marriages really and truly are made in Heaven, don't you? Some day Prince Charming will
come, the perfect lover--" She was so young, her lips were so young, so very sweet! "--and of course I want to keep myself for him. It would
spoil everything if I made light of love before my Hero came."

But her smile was caressing.

He pictured them thrown together in a lonely camp. He saw her parroted moralities forgotten. He went through a change as definite as religious
conversion or the coming of insane frenzy in war; the change from shamed reluctance to be unfaithful to his wife, to a determination to take what
he could get. He began to resent Leora's demand that she, who had eternally his deepest love, should also demand his every wandering fancy. And
she did demand it. She rarely spoke of Orchid, but she could tell (or nervously he thought she could tell) when he had spent an afternoon with
the child. Her mute examination of him made him feel illicit. He who had never been unctuous was profuse and hearty as he urged her, "Been home
all day? Well, we'll just skip out after dinner and take in a movie. Or shall we call up somebody and go see 'em? Whatever you'd like."

He heard his voice being flowery, and he hated it and knew that Leora was not cajoled. Whenever he drifted into one of his meditations on the
superiority of his brand of truth to Pickerbaugh's, he snarled, "You're a fine bird to think about truth, you liar!"

He paid, in fact, an enormous price for looking at Orchid's lips, and no amount of anxiety about the price kept him from looking at them.

In early summer, two months before the outbreak of the Great War in Europe, Leora went to Wheatsylvania for a fortnight with her family. Then she
spoke:

"Sandy, I'm not going to ask you any questions when I come back, but I hope you won't look as foolish as you've been looking lately. I don't
think that bachelor's button, that ragweed, that lady idiot of yours is worth our quarreling. Sandy darling, I do want you to be happy, but
unless I up and die on you some day, I'm not going to be hung up like an old cap. I warn you. Now about ice. I've left an order for a hundred
pounds a week, and if you want to get your own dinners sometimes--"

When she had gone, nothing immediately happened, though a good deal was always about to happen. Orchid had the flapper's curiosity as to what a
man was likely to do, but she was satisfied by exceedingly small thrills.

Martin swore, that morning of June, that she was a fool and a flirt, and he "hadn't the slightest intention of going near her." No! He would call
on Irving Watters in the evening, or read, or have a walk with the school-clinic dentist.

But at half-past eight he was loitering toward her house.

If the elder Pickerbaughs were there-- Martin could hear himself saying, "Thought I'd just drop by, Doctor, and ask you what you thought about--"
Hang it! Thought about what? Pickerbaugh never thought about anything.

On the low front steps he could see Orchid. Leaning over her was a boy of twenty, one Charley, a clerk.

"Hello, Father in?" he cried, with a carelessness on which he could but pride himself.

"I'm terribly sorry; he and Mama won't be back till eleven. Won't you sit down and cool off a little?"

"Well--" He did sit down, firmly, and tried to make youthful conversation, while Charley produced sentiments suitable, in Charley's opinion, to
the aged Dr. Arrowsmith, and Orchid made little purry interested sounds, an art in which she was very intelligent.

"Been, uh, been seeing many of the baseball games?" said Martin.

"Oh, been getting in all I can," said Charley. "How's things going at City Hall? Been nailing a lot of cases of small-pox and winkulus pinkulus
and all those fancy diseases?"

"Oh, keep busy," grunted old Dr. Arrowsmith.

He could think of nothing else. He listened while Charley and Orchid giggled cryptically about things which barred him out and made him feel a
hundred years old: references to Mamie and Earl, and a violent "Yeh, that's all right, but any time you see me dancing with her you just tell me
about it, will yuh!" At the corner, Verbena Pickerbaugh was yelping, and observing, "Now you quit!" to persons unknown.

"Hell! It isn't worth it! I'm going home," Martin sighed, but at the moment Charley screamed, "Well, ta, ta, be good; gotta toddle along."

He was left to Orchid and peace and a silence rather embarrassing.

"It's so nice to be with somebody that has brains and doesn't always try to flirt, like Charley," said Orchid.

He considered, "Splendid! She's going to be just a nice good girl. And I've come to my senses. We'll just have a little chat and I'll go home."

She seemed to have moved nearer. She whispered at him, "I was so lonely, especially with that horrid slangy boy, till I heard your step on the
walk. I knew it the second I heard it."

He patted her hand. As his pats were becoming more ardent than might have been expected from the assistant and friend of her father, she withdrew
her hand, clasped her knees, and began to chatter.

Always it had been so in the evenings when he had drifted to the porch and found her alone. She was ten times more incalculable than the most
complex woman. He managed to feel guilty toward Leora without any of the reputed joys of being guilty.

While she talked he tried to discover whether she had any brains whatever. Apparently she did not have enough to attend a small Midwestern
denominational college. Verbena was going to college this autumn, but Orchid, she explained, thought she "ought to stay home and help Mama take
care of the chickabiddies."

"Meaning," Martin reflected, "that she can't even pass the Mugford entrance exams!" But his opinion of her intelligence was suddenly enlarged as
she whimpered, "Poor little me, prob'ly I'll always stay here in Nautilus, while you--oh, with your knowledge and your frightfully strong will-
power, I know you're going to conquer the world!"

"Nonsense, I'll never conquer any world, but I do hope to pull off a few good health measures. Honestly, Orchid honey, do you think I have much
will-power?"

The full moon was spacious now behind the maples. The seedy Pickerbaugh domain was enchanted; the tangled grass was a garden of roses, the ragged
grape-arbor a shrine to Diana, the old hammock turned to fringed cloth of silver, the bad-tempered and sputtering lawn-sprinkler a fountain, and
over all the world was the proper witchery of moonstruck love. The little city, by day as noisy and busy as a pack of children, was stilled and
forgotten. Rarely had Martin been inspired to perceive the magic of a perfect hour, so absorbed was he ever in irascible pondering, but now he
was caught, and lifted in rapture.

He held Orchid's quiet hand--and was lonely for Leora.

The belligerent Martin who had carried off Leora had not thought about romance, because in his clumsy way he had been romantic. The Martin who,
like a returned warrior scented and enfeebled, yearned toward a girl in the moonlight, now desirously lifted his face to romance and was
altogether unromantic.

He felt the duty of making love. He drew her close, but when she sighed, "Oh, please don't," there was in him no ruthlessness and no conviction
with which to go on. He considered the moonlight again, but also he considered being at the office early in the morning, and he wondered if he
could without detection slip out his watch and see what time it was. He managed it. He stooped to kiss her good-night, and somehow didn't quite
kiss her, and found himself walking home.

As he went, he was ruthless and convinced enough regarding himself. He had never, he raged, however stumbling he might have been, expected to
find himself a little pilferer of love, a peeping, creeping area-sneak, and not even successful in his sneaking, less successful than the soda-
clerks who swanked nightly with the virgins under the maples. He told himself that Orchid was a young woman of no great wisdom, a sigher and
drawer-out of her M's and O's, but once he was in his lonely flat he longed for her, thought of miraculous and completely idiotic ways of luring
her here tonight, and went to bed yearning, "Oh, Orchid--"

Perhaps he had paid too much attention to moonlight and soft summer, for quite suddenly, one day when Orchid came swarming all over the
laboratory and perched on the bench with a whisk of stockings, he stalked to her, masterfully seized her wrists, and kissed her as she deserved
to be kissed.

He immediately ceased to be masterful. He was frightened. He stared at her wanly. She stared back, shocked, eyes wide, lips uncertain.

"Oh!" she profoundly said.

Then, in a tone of immense interest and some satisfaction:

"Martin--oh--my dear--do you think you ought to have done that?"

He kissed her again. She yielded and for a moment there was nothing in the universe, neither he nor she, neither laboratory nor fathers nor wives
nor traditions, but only the intensity of their being together.

Suddenly she babbled, "I know there's lots of conventional people that would say we'd done wrong, and perhaps I'd have thought so, one time, but-
- Oh, I'm terribly glad I'm liberal! Of course I wouldn't hurt dear Leora or do anything REALLY wrong for the world, but isn't it wonderful that
with so many bourgeois folks all around, we can rise above them and realize the call that strength makes to strength and-- But I've simply GOT to
be at the Y.W.C.A. meeting. There's a woman lawyer from New York that's going to tell us about the Modern Woman's Career."

When she had gone Martin viewed himself as a successful lover. "I've won her," he gloated. . . . Probably never has gloating been so shakily and
badly done.

That evening, when he was playing poker in his flat with Irving Watters, the school-clinic dentist, and a young doctor from the city clinic, the
telephone bell summoned him to an excited but saccharine:

"This is Orchid. Are you glad I called up?"

"Oh, yes, yes, mighty glad you called up." He tried to make it at once amorously joyful, and impersonal enough to beguile the three coatless,
beer-swizzling, grinning doctors.

"Are you doing anything this evening, Marty?"

"Just, uh, couple fellows here for a little game cards."

"Oh!" It was acute. "Oh, then you-- I was such a baby to call you up, but Daddy is away and Verbena and everybody, and it was such a lovely
evening, and I just thought-- DO you think I'm an awful little silly?"

"No--no--sure not."

"I'm so glad you don't. I'd hate it if I thought you thought I was just a silly to call you up. You don't, do you?"

"No--no--course not. Look, I've got to--"

"I know. I mustn't keep you. But I just wanted you to tell me whether you thought I was a silly to--"

"No! Honest! Really!"

Three fidgety minutes later, deplorably aware of masculine snickers from behind him, he escaped. The poker-players said all the things considered
suitable in Nautilus: "Oh, you little Don Jewen!" and "Can you beat it--his wife only gone for a week!" and "Who is she, Doctor? Go on, you
tightwad, bring her up here!" and "Say, I know who it is; it's that little milliner on Prairie Avenue."

Next noon she telephoned from a drug store that she had lain awake all night, and on profound contemplation decided that they "musn't ever do
that sort of thing again"--and would he meet her at the corner of Crimmins Street and Missouri Avenue at eight, so that they might talk it all
over?

In the afternoon she telephoned and changed the tryst to half-past eight.

At five she called up just to remind him--

In the laboratory that day Martin transplanted cultures no more. He was too confusedly human to be a satisfactory experimenter, too coldly
thinking to be a satisfactory sinful male, and all the while he longed for the sure solace of Leora.

"I can go as far as I like with her tonight.

"But she's a brainless man-chaser.

"All the better. I'm tired of being a punk philosopher.

"I wonder if these other lucky lovers that you read about in all this fiction and poetry feel as glum as I do?

"I will NOT be middle-aged and cautious and monogamic and moral! It's against my religion. I demand the right to be free--

"Hell! These free souls that have to slave at being free are just as bad as their Methodist dads. I have enough sound natural immorality in me so
I can afford to be moral. I want to keep my brain clear for work. I don't want it blurred by dutifully running around trying to kiss everybody I
can.

"Orchid is too easy. I hate to give up the right of being a happy sinner, but my way was so straight, with just Leora and my work, and I'm not
going to mess it. God help any man that likes his work and his wife! He's beaten from the beginning."

He met Orchid at eight-thirty, and the whole matter was unkind. He was equally distasteful of the gallant Martin of two days ago and the prosy
cautious Martin of tonight. He went home desolately ascetic, and longed for Orchid all the night.

A week later Leora returned from Wheatsylvania.

He met her at the station.

"It's all right," he said. "I feel a hundred and seven years old. I'm a respectable, moral young man, and Lord how I'd hate it, if it wasn't for
my precipitation test and you and-- WHY do you always lose your trunk check? I suppose I am a bad example for others, giving up so easily. No,
no, darling, can't you SEE, that's the transportation check the conductor gave you!"




Chapter 22



This summer Pickerbaugh had shouted and hand-shaken his way through a brief Chautauqua tour in Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas. Martin realized that
though he seemed, in contrast to Gustaf Sondelius, an unfortunately articulate and generous lout, he was destined to be ten times better known in
America than Sondelius could ever be, a thousand times better known than Max Gottlieb.

He was a correspondent of many of the nickel-plated Great Men whose pictures and sonorous aphorisms appeared in the magazines: the advertising
men who wrote little books about Pep and Optimism, the editor of the magazine which told clerks how to become Goethes and Stonewall Jacksons by
studying correspondence-courses and never touching the manhood-rotting beer, and the cornfield sage who was equally an authority on finance,
peace, biology, editing, Peruvian ethnology, and making oratory pay. These intellectual rulers recognized Pickerbaugh as one of them; they wrote
quippish letters to him: and when he answered he signed himself "Pick," in red pencil.

The Onward March Magazine, which specialized in biographies of Men Who Have Made Good, had an account of Pickerbaugh among its sketches of the
pastor who built his own, beautiful Neo-Gothic church out of tin cans, the lady who had in seven years kept 2,698 factory-girls from leading
lives of shame, and the Oregon cobbler who had taught himself to read Sanskrit, Finnish, and Esperanto.

"Meet Ol' Doe Almus Pickerbaugh, a he-man whom Chum Frink has hailed as 'the two-fisted, fighting poet doc,' a scientist who puts his remarkable
discoveries right over third base, yet who, as a reg'lar old-fashioned Sunday-school superintendent, rebukes the atheistic so-called scientists
that are menacing the foundations of our religion and liberties by their smart-aleck cracks at everything that is noble and improving," chanted
the chronicler.

Martin was reading this article, trying to realize that it was actually exposed in a fabulous New York magazine, with a million circulation, when
Pickerbaugh summoned him.

"Marty" he said, "do you feel competent to run this Department?"

"Why, uh--"

"Do you think you can buck the Interests and keep a clean city all by yourself?"

"Why, uh--"

"Because it looks as if I were going to Washington, as the next congressman from this district!"

"Really?"

"Looks that way. Boy, I'm going to take to the whole nation the Message I've tried to ram home here!"

Martin got out quite a good "I congratulate you." He was so astonished that it sounded fervent. He still had a fragment of his boyhood belief
that congressmen were persons of intelligence and importance.

"I've just been in conference with some of the leading Republicans of the district. Great surprise to me. Ha, ha, ha! Maybe they picked me
because they haven't anybody else to run this year. Ha, ha, ha!"

Martin also laughed. Pickerbaugh looked as though that was not exactly the right response, but he recovered and caroled on:

"I said to them, 'Gentlemen, I must warn you that I am not sure I possess the rare qualifications needful in a man who shall have the high
privilege of laying down, at Washington, the rules and regulations for the guidance, in every walk of life, of this great nation of a hundred
million people. However, gentlemen,' I said, 'the impulse that prompts me to consider, in all modesty, your unexpected and probably undeserved
honor is the fact that it seems to me that what Congress needs is more forward-looking scientists to plan and more genu-ine trained business men
to execute the improvements demanded by our evolving commonwealth, and also the possibility of persuading the Boys there at Washington of the
pre-eminent and crying need of a Secretary of Health who shall completely control--'"

But no matter what Martin thought about it, the Republicans really did nominate Pickerbaugh for Congress.


II


While Pickerbaugh went out campaigning, Martin was in charge of the Department, and he began his reign by getting himself denounced as a tyrant
and a radical.

There was no more sanitary and efficient dairy in Iowa than that of old Klopchuk, on the outskirts of Nautilus. It was tiled and drained and
excellently lighted; the milking machines were perfect; the bottles were super-boiled; and Klopchuk welcomed inspectors and the tuberculin test.
He had fought the dairy-men's union and kept his dairy open-shop by paying more than the union scale. Once, when Martin attended a meeting of the
Nautilus Central Labor Council as Pickerbaugh's representative, the secretary of the council confessed that there was no plant which they would
so like to unionize and which they were so unlikely to unionize as Klopchuk's Dairy.

Now Martin's labor sympathies were small. Like most laboratory men, he believed that the reason why workmen found less joy in sewing vests or in
pulling a lever than he did in a long research was because they were an inferior race, born lazy and wicked. The complaint of the unions was the
one thing to convince him that at last he had found perfection.

Often he stopped at Klopchuk's merely for the satisfaction of it. He noted but one thing which disturbed him: a milker had a persistent sore
throat. He examined the man, made cultures, and found hemolytic streptococcus. In a panic he hurried back to the dairy, and after cultures he
discovered that there was streptococcus in the udders of three cows.

When Pickerbaugh had saved the health of the nation through all the smaller towns in the congressional district and had returned to Nautilus,
Martin insisted on the quarantine of the infected milker and the closing of the Klopchuk Dairy till no more infection should be found.

"Nonsense! Why, that's the cleanest place in the city," Pickerbaugh scoffed. "Why borrow trouble? There's no sign of an epidemic of strep."

"There darn' well will be! Three cows infected. Look at what's happened in Boston and Baltimore, here recently. I've asked Klopchuk to come in
and talk it over."

"Well, you know how busy I am, but--"

Klopchuk appeared at eleven, and to Klopchuk the affair was tragic. Born in a gutter in Poland, starving in New York, working twenty hours a day
in Vermont, in Ohio, in Iowa, he had made this beautiful thing, his dairy.

Seamed, drooping, twirling his hat, almost in tears, he protested, "Dr. Pickerbaugh, I do everything the doctors say is necessary. I know
dairies! Now comes this young man and he says because one of my men has a cold, I kill little children with diseased milk! I tell you, this is my
life, and I would sooner hang myself than send out one drop of bad milk. The young man has some wicked reason. I have asked questions. I find he
is a great friend from the Central Labor Council. Why, he go to their meetings! And they want to break me!"

To Martin the trembling old man was pitiful, but he had never before been accused of treachery. He said grimly:

"You can take up the personal charges against me later, Dr. Pickerbaugh. Meantime I suggest you have in some expert to test my results; say Long
of Chicago or Brent of Minneapolis or somebody."

"I--I--I--" The Kipling and Billy Sunday of health looked as distressed as Klopchuk. "I'm sure our friend here doesn't really mean to make
charges against you, Mart. He's overwrought, naturally. Can't we just treat the fellow that has the strep infection and not make everybody
uncomfortable?"

"All right, if you want a bad epidemic here, toward the end of your campaign!"

"You know cussed well I'd do anything to avoid-- Though I want you to distinctly understand it has nothing to do with my campaign for Congress!
It's simply that I owe my city the most scrupulous performance of duty in safeguarding it against disease, and the most fearless enforcement--"

At the end of his oratory Pickerbaugh telegraphed to Dr. J. C. Long, the Chicago bacteriologist.

Dr. Long looked as though he had made the train journey in an ice-box. Martin had never seen a man so free from the poetry and flowing
philanthropy of Almus Pickerbaugh. He was slim, precise, lipless, lapless, and eye-glassed, and his hair was parted in the middle. He coolly
listened to Martin, coldly listened to Pickerbaugh, icily heard Klopchuk, made his inspection, and reported, "Dr. Arrowsmith seems to know his
business perfectly, there is certainly a danger here, I advise closing the dairy, my fee is one hundred dollars, thank you no I shall not stay to
dinner I must catch the evening train."

Martin went home to Leora snarling, "That man was just as lovable as a cucumber salad, but my God, Lee, with his freedom from bunk he's made me
wild to get back to research; away from all these humanitarians that are so busy hollering about loving the dear people that they let the people
die! I hated him, but-- Wonder what Max Gottlieb's doing this evening? The old German crank! I'll bet--I'll bet he's talking music or something
with some terrible highbrow bunch. Wouldn't you like to see the old coot again? You know, just couple minutes. D'I ever tell you about the time I
made the dandy stain of the trypanosomes-- Oh, did I?"

He assumed that with the temporary closing of the dairy the matter was ended. He did not understand how hurt was Klopchuk. He knew that Irving
Watters, Klopchuk's physician, was unpleasant when they met, grumbling, "What's the use going on being an alarmist, Mart?" But he did not know
how many persons in Nautilus had been trustily informed that this fellow Arrowsmith was in the pay of labor-union thugs.


III


Two months before, when Martin had been making his annual inspection of factories, he had encountered Clay Tredgold, the president (by
inheritance) of the Steel Windmill Company. He had heard that Tredgold, an elaborate but easy-spoken man of forty-five, moved as one clad in
purple on the loftiest planes of Nautilus society. After the inspection Tredgold urged, "Sit down, Doctor; have a cigar and tell me all about
sanitation."

Martin was wary. There was in Tredgold's affable eye a sardonic flicker.

"What d'you want to know about sanitation?"

"Oh, all about it."

"The only thing I know is that your men must like you. Of course you haven't enough wash-bowls in that second-floor toilet room, and the whole
lot of 'em swore you were putting in others immediately. If they like you enough to lie against their own interests, you must be a good boss, and
I think I'll let you get away with it--till my next inspection! Well, got to hustle."

Tredgold beamed on him. "My dear man, I've been pulling that dodge on Pickerbaugh for three years. I'm glad to have seen you. And I think I
really may put in some more bowls--just before your next inspection. Good-by!"

After the Klopchuk affair, Martin and Leora encountered Clay Tredgold and that gorgeous slim woman, his wife, in front of a motion-picture
theater.

"Give you a lift, Doctor?" cried Tredgold.

On the way he suggested, "I don't know whether you're dry, like Pickerbaugh, but if you'd like I'll run you out to the house and present you with
the noblest cocktail conceived since Evangeline County went dry. Does it sound reasonable?"

"I haven't heard anything so reasonable for years," said Martin.

The Tredgold house was on the highest knoll (fully twenty feet above the general level of the plain) in Ashford Grove, which is the Back Bay of
Nautilus. It was a Colonial structure, with a sun-parlor, a white-paneled hall, and a blue and silver drawing-room. Martin tried to look casual
as they were wafted in on Mrs. Tredgold's chatter, but it was the handsomest house he had ever entered.

While Leora sat on the edge of her chair in the manner of one likely to be sent home, and Mrs. Tredgold sat forward like a hostess, Tredgold
flourished the cocktail-shaker and performed courtesies:

"How long you been here now, Doctor?"

"Almost a year."

"Try that. Look here, it strikes me you're kind of different from Salvation Pickerbaugh."

Martin felt that he ought to praise his chief but, to Leora's gratified amazement, he sprang up and ranted in something like Pickerbaugh's best
manner:

"Gentlemen of the Steel Windmill Industries, than which there is no other that has so largely contributed to the prosperity of our commonwealth,
while I realize that you are getting away with every infraction of the health laws that the inspector doesn't catch you at, yet I desire to pay a
tribute to your high respect for sanitation, patriotism, and cocktails, and if I only had an assistant more earnest than young Arrowsmith, I
should, with your permission, become President of the United States."

Tredgold clapped. Mrs. Tredgold asserted, "If that isn't exactly like Dr. Pickerbaugh!" Leora looked proud, and so did her husband.

"I'm so glad you're free from this socialistic clap-trap of Pickerbaugh's," said Tredgold.

The assumption roused something sturdy and defensive in Martin:

"Oh, I don't care a hang how socialistic he is--whatever that means. Don't know anything about socialism. But since I've gone and given an
imitation of him--I suppose it was probably disloyal--I must say I'm not very fond of oratory that's so full of energy it hasn't any room for
facts. But mind you, Tredgold, it's partly the fault of people like your Manufacturers' Association. You encourage him to rant. I'm a laboratory
man--or rather, I sometimes wish I were. I like to deal with exact figures."

"So do I. I was keen on mathematics in Williams," said Tredgold.

Instantly Martin and he were off on education, damning the universities for turning out graduates like sausages. Martin found himself becoming
confidential about "variables," and Tredgold proclaimed that he had not wanted to take up the ancestral factory, but to specialize in astronomy.

Leora was confessing to the friendly Mrs. Tredgold how cautiously the wife of an assistant director has to economize and with that caressing
voice of hers Mrs. Tredgold comforted, "I know. I was horribly hard-up after Dad died. Have you tried the little Swedish dressmaker on Crimmins
Street, two doors from the Catholic church? She's awfully clever, and so cheap."

Martin had found, for the first time since marriage, a house in which he was altogether happy; Leora had found, in a woman with the easy
smartness which she had always feared and hated, the first woman to whom she could talk of God and the price of toweling. They came out from
themselves and were not laughed at.

It was at midnight, when the charms of bacteriology and toweling were becoming pallid, that outside the house sounded a whooping, wheezing motor
horn, and in lumbered a ruddy fat man who was introduced as Mr. Schlemihl, president of the Cornbelt Insurance Company of Nautilus.

Even more than Clay Tredgold was he a leader of the Ashford Grove aristocracy, but, while he stood like an invading barbarian in the blue and
silver room, Schlemihl was cordial:

"Glad meet yuh, Doctor. Well, say, Clay, I'm tickled to death you've found another highbrow to gas with. Me, Arrowsmith, I'm simply a poor old
insurance salesman. Clay is always telling me what an illiterate boob I am. Look here, Clay darling, do I get a cocktail or don't I? I seen your
lights! I seen you in here telling what a smart guy you are! Come on! MIX!"

Tredgold mixed, extensively. Before he had finished, young Monte Mugford, great-grandson of the sainted but side-whiskered Nathaniel Mugford who
had founded Mugford College, also came in, uninvited. He wondered at the presence of Martin, found him human, told him he was human, and did his
rather competent best to catch up on the cocktails.

Thus it happened that at three in the morning Martin was singing to a commendatory audience the ballad he had learned from Gustaf Sondelius:


She'd a dark and a roving eye, And her hair hung down in ringlets, A nice girl, a decent girl, But one of the rakish kind.


At four, the Arrowsmiths had been accepted by the most desperately Smart Set of Nautilus, and at four-thirty they were driven home, at a speed
neither legal nor kind, by Clay Tredgold.


IV


There was in Nautilus a country club which was the axis of what they called Society, but there was also a tribe of perhaps twelve families in the
Ashford Grove section who, though they went to the country club for golf, condescended to other golfers, kept to themselves, and considered
themselves as belonging more to Chicago than to Nautilus. They took turns in entertaining one another. They assumed that they were all welcome at
any party given by any of them, and to none of their parties was anyone outside the Group invited except migrants from larger cities and
occasional free lances like Martin. They were a tight little garrison in a heathen town.

The members of the Group were very rich, and one of them, Montgomery Mugford, knew something about his great-grandfather. They lived in Tudor
manor houses and Italian villas so new that the scarred lawns had only begun to grow. They had large cars and larger cellars, though the cellars
contained nothing but gin, whisky, vermouth, and a few sacred bottles of rather sweet champagne. Everyone in the Group was familiar with New
York--they stayed at the St. Regis or the Plaza and went about buying clothes and discovering small smart restaurants--and five of the twelve
couples had been in Europe; had spent a week in Paris, intending to go to art galleries and actually going to the more expensive fool-traps of
Montmartre.

In the Group Martin and Leora found themselves welcomed as poor relations. They were invited to choric dinners, to Sunday lunches at the country
club. Whatever the event, it always ended in rapidly motoring somewhere, having a number of drinks, and insisting that Martin again "give that
imitation of Doc Pickerbaugh."

Besides motoring, drinking, and dancing to the Victrola, the chief diversion of the Group was cards. Curiously, in this completely unmoral set,
there were no flirtations; they talked with considerable freedom about "sex," but they all seemed monogamic, all happily married or afraid to
appear unhappily married. But when Martin knew them better he heard murmurs of husbands having "times" in Chicago, of wives picking up young men
in New York hotels, and he scented furious restlessness beneath their superior sexual calm.

It is not known whether Martin ever completely accepted as a gentleman-scholar the Clay Tredgold who was devoted to everything about astronomy
except studying it, or Monte Mugford as the highly descended aristocrat, but he did admire the Group's motor cars, shower baths, Fifth Avenue
frocks, tweed plus-fours, and houses somewhat impersonally decorated by daffodillic young men from Chicago. He discovered sauces and old silver.
He began to consider Leora's clothes not merely as convenient coverings, but as a possible expression of charm, and irritably he realized how
careless she was.

In Nautilus, alone, rarely saying much about herself, Leora had developed an intense mute little life of her own. She belonged to a bridge club,
and she went solemnly by herself to the movies, but her ambition was to know France and it engrossed her. It was an old desire, mysterious in
source and long held secret, but suddenly she was sighing:

"Sandy, the one thing I want to do, maybe ten years from now, is to see Touraine and Normandy and Carcassonne. Could we, do you think?"

Rarely had Leora asked for anything. He was touched and puzzled as he watched her reading books on Brittany, as he caught her, over a highly
simplified French grammar, breathing "J'ay--j'aye--damn it, whatever it is!"

He crowed, "Lee, dear if you want to go to France-- Listen! Some day we'll shoot over there with a couple of knapsacks on our backs, and we'll
see that ole country from end to end!"

Gratefully yet doubtfully: "You know if you got bored, Sandy, you could go see the work at the Pasteur Institute. Oh, I would like to tramp, just
once, between high plastered walls, and come to a foolish little cafe and watch the men with funny red sashes and floppy blue pants go by.
Really, do you think maybe we could?"

Leora was strangely popular in the Ashford Grove Group, though she possessed nothing of what Martin called their "elegance." She always had at
least one button missing. Mrs. Tredgold, best natured as she was least pious of women, adopted her complete.

Nautilus had always doubted Clara Tredgold. Mrs. Almus Pickerbaugh said that she "took no part in any movement for the betterment of the city."
For years she had seemed content to grow her roses, to make her startling hats, to almond-cream her lovely hands, and listen to her husband's
improper stories--and for years she had been a lonely woman. In Leora she perceived an interested casualness equal to her own. The two women
spent afternoons sitting on the sun-porch, reading, doing their nails, smoking cigarettes, saying nothing, trusting each other.

With the other women of the Group Leora was never so intimate as with Clara Tredgold, but they liked her, the more because she was a heretic
whose vices, her smoking, her indolence, her relish of competent profanity, disturbed Mrs. Pickerbaugh and Mrs. Irving Watters. The Group rather
approved all unconventionalities--except such economic unconventionalities as threatened their easy wealth. Leora had tea, or a cocktail, alone
with nervous young Mrs. Monte Mugford, who had been the lightest-footed debutante in Des Moines four years before and who hated now the coming of
her second baby; and it was to Leora that Mrs. Schlemihl, though publicly she was rompish and serene with her porker of a husband, burst out, "If
that man would only quit pawing me--reaching for me--slobbering on me! I hate it here! I WILL have my winter in New York--alone!"

The childish Martin Arrowsmith, so unworthy of Leora's old quiet wisdoms, was not content with her acceptance by the Group. When she appeared
with a hook unfastened or her hair like a crow's nest, he worried, and said things about her "sloppiness" which he later regretted.

"Why can't you take a little time to make yourself attractive? God knows you haven't anything else to do! Great Jehoshaphat, can't you even sew
on buttons?"

But Clara Tredgold laughed, "Leora, I do think you have the sweetest back, but do you mind if I pin you up before the others come?"

It happened after a party which lasted till two, when Mrs. Schlemihl had worn the new frock from Lucile's and Jack Brundidge (by day vice-
president and sales-manager of the Maize Mealies Company) had danced what he belligerently asserted to be a Finnish polka, that when Martin and
Leora were driving home in a borrowed Health Department car he snarled, "Lee, why can't you ever take any trouble with what you wear? Here this
morning--or yesterday morning--you were going to mend that blue dress, and as far as I can figure out you haven't done a darn' thing the whole
day but sit around and read, and then you come out with that ratty embroidery--"

"Will you stop the car!" she cried.

He stopped it, astonished. The headlights made ridiculously important a barbed-wire fence, a litter of milkweeds, a bleak reach of gravel road.

She demanded, "Do you want me to become a harem beauty? I could. I could be a floosey. But I've never taken the trouble. Oh, Sandy, I won't go on
fighting with you. Either I'm the foolish sloppy wife that I am, or I'm nothing. What do you want? Do you want a real princess like Clara
Tredgold, or do you want me, that don't care a hang where we go or what we do as long as we stand by each other? You do such a lot of worrying.
I'm tired of it. Come on now. What do you want?"

"I don't want anything but you. But can't you understand--I'm not just a climber--I want us both to be equal to anything we run into. I certainly
don't see why we should be inferior to this bunch, in ANYTHING. Darling, except for Clara, maybe, they're nothing but rich bookkeepers! But we're
real soldiers of fortune. Your France that you love so much--some day we'll go there, and the French President will be at the N.P. depot to meet
us! Why should we let anybody do anything better than we can? Technique!"

They talked for an hour in that drab place, between the poisonous lines of barbed wire.

Next day, when Orchid came into his laboratory and begged, with the wistfulness of youth, "Oh, Dr. Martin, aren't you ever coming to the house
again?" he kissed her so briskly, so cheerfully, that even a flapper could perceive that she was unimportant.


V


Martin realized that he was likely to be the next Director of the Department. Pickerbaugh had told him, "Your work is very satisfactory. There's
only one thing you lack, my boy: enthusiasm for getting together with folks and giving a long pull and a strong pull, all together. But perhaps
that'll come to you when you have more responsibility."

Martin sought to acquire a delight in giving long strong pulls all together, but he felt like a man who has been dragooned into wearing yellow
tights at a civic pageant.

"Gosh, I may be up against it when I become Director," he fretted. "I wonder if there's people who become what's called 'successful' and then
hate it? Well, anyway, I'll start a decent system of vital statistics in the department before they get me. I won't lay down! I'll fight! I'll
make myself succeed!"




Chapter 23



It may have been a yearning to give one concentrated dose of inspiration so powerful that no citizen of Nautilus would ever again dare to be ill,
or perhaps Dr. Pickerbaugh desired a little reasonable publicity for his congressional campaign, but certainly the Health Fair which the good man
organized was overpowering.

He got an extra appropriation from the Board of Aldermen; he bullied all the churches and associations into co-operation; he made the newspapers
promise to publish three columns of praise each day.

He rented the rather dilapidated wooden "tabernacle" in which the Reverend Mr. Billy Sunday, an evangelist, had recently wiped out all the sin in
the community. He arranged for a number of novel features. The Boy Scouts were to give daily drills. There was a W.C.T.U. booth at which
celebrated clergymen and other physiologists would demonstrate the evils of alcohol. In a bacteriology booth, the protesting Martin (in a dinky
white coat) was to do jolly things with test-tubes. An anti-nicotine lady from Chicago offered to kill a mouse every half-hour by injecting
ground-up cigarette paper into it. The Pickerbaugh twins, Arbuta and Gladiola, now aged six, were to show the public how to brush its teeth, and
in fact they did, until a sixty-year-old farmer of whom they had lovingly inquired, "Do you brush your teeth daily?" made thunderous answer, "No,
but I'm going to paddle your bottoms daily, and I'm going to start in right now."

None of these novelties was so stirring as the Eugenic Family, who had volunteered to give, for a mere forty dollars a day, an example of the
benefits of healthful practices.

They were father, mother, and five children, all so beautiful and powerful that they had recently been presenting refined acrobatic exhibitions
on the Chautauqua Circuit. None of them smoked, drank, spit upon pavements, used foul language, or ate meat. Pickerbaugh assigned to them the
chief booth on the platform once sacerdotally occupied by the Reverend Mr. Sunday.

There were routine exhibits: booths with charts and banners and leaflets. The Pickerbaugh Healthette Octette held song recitals, and daily there
were lectures, most of them by Pickerbaugh or by his friend Dr. Bissex, football coach and professor of hygiene and most other subjects in
Mugford College.

A dozen celebrities, including Gustaf Sondelius and the governor of the state, were invited to come and "give their messages," but it happened,
unfortunately, that none of them seemed able to get away that particular week.

The Health Fair opened with crowds and success. There was a slight misunderstanding the first day. The Master Bakers' Association spoke strongly
to Pickerbaugh about the sign "Too much pie makes pyorrhea" on the diet booth. But the thoughtless and prosperity-destroying sign was removed at
once, and the Fair was thereafter advertised in every bakery in town.

The only unhappy participant, apparently, was Martin. Pickerbaugh had fitted up for him an exhibition laboratory which, except that it had no
running water and except that the fire laws forbade his using any kind of a flame, was exactly like a real one. All day long he poured a solution
of red ink from one test-tube into another, with his microscope carefully examined nothing at all, and answered the questions of persons who
wished to know how you put bacterias to death once you had caught them swimming about.

Leora appeared as his assistant, very pretty and demure in a nurse's costume, very exasperating as she chuckled at his low cursing. They found
one friend, the fireman on duty, a splendid person with stories about pet cats in the fire-house and no tendency to ask questions in
bacteriology. It was he who showed them how they could smoke in safety. Behind the Clean Up and Prevent Fires exhibit, consisting of a miniature
Dirty House with red arrows to show where a fire might start and an extremely varnished Clean House, there was an alcove with a broken window
which would carry off the smoke of their cigarettes. To this sanctuary Martin, Leora, and the bored fireman retired a dozen times a day, and thus
wore through the week.

One other misfortune occurred. The detective sergeant coming in not to detect but to see the charming spectacle of the mouse dying in agony from
cigarette paper, stopped before the booth of the Eugenic Family, scratched his head, hastened to the police station, and returned with certain
pictures. He growled to Pickerbaugh:

"Hm. That Eugenic Family. Don't smoke or booze or anything?"

"Absolutely! And look at their perfect health."

"Hm. Better keep an eye on 'em. I won't spoil your show, Doc--we fellows at City Hall had all ought to stick together. I won't run 'em out of
town till after the Fair. But they're the Holton gang. The man and woman ain't married, and only one of the kids is theirs. They've done time for
selling licker to the Indians, but their specialty, before they went into education, used to be the badger game. I'll detail a plain-clothes man
to keep 'em straight. Fine show you got here, Doc. Ought to give this city a lasting lesson in the value of up-to-date health methods. Good luck!
Say, have you picked your secretary yet, for when you get to Congress? I've got a nephew that's a crackajack stenographer and a bright kid and
knows how to keep his mouth shut about stuff that don't concern him. I'll send him around to have a talk with you. So long."

But, except that once he caught the father of the Eugenic Family relieving the strain of being publicly healthy by taking a long, gurgling,
ecstatic drink from a flask, Pickerbaugh found nothing wrong in their conduct, till Saturday. There was nothing wrong with anything, till then.

Never had a Fair been such a moral lesson, or secured so much publicity. Every newspaper in the congressional district gave columns to it, and
all the accounts, even in the Democratic papers, mentioned Pickerbaugh's campaign.

Then, on Saturday, the last day of the Fair, came tragedy.

There was terrific rain, the roof leaked without restraint, and the lady in charge of the Healthy Housing Booth, which also leaked, was taken
home threatened with pneumonia. At noon, when the Eugenic Family were giving a demonstration of perfect vigor, their youngest blossom had an
epileptic fit, and before the excitement was over, upon the Chicago anti-nicotine lady as she triumphantly assassinated a mouse charged an anti-
vivisection lady, also from Chicago.

Round the two ladies and the unfortunate mouse gathered a crowd. The anti-vivisection lady called the anti-nicotine lady a murderer, a wretch,
and an atheist, all of which the anti-nicotine lady endured, merely weeping a little and calling for the police. But when the anti-vivisection
lady wound up, "And as for your pretensions to know anything about science, you're no scientist at all!" then with a shriek the anti-nicotine
lady leaped from her platform, dug her fingers into the anti-vivisection lady's hair, and observed with distinctness, "I'll show you whether I
know anything about science!"

Pickerbaugh tried to separate them. Martin, standing happily with Leora and their friend the fireman on the edge, distinctly did not. Both ladies
turned on Pickerbaugh and denounced him, and when they had been removed he was the center of a thousand chuckles, in decided danger of never
going to Congress.

At two o'clock, when the rain had slackened, when the after-lunch crowd had come in and the story of the anti ladies was running strong, the
fireman retired behind the Clean Up and Prevent Fires exhibit for his hourly smoke. He was a very sleepy and unhappy little fireman; he was
thinking about the pleasant fire-house and the unending games of pinochle. He dropped the match, unextinguished on the back porch of the model
Clean House. The Clean House had been so handsomely oiled that it was like kindling soaked in kerosene. It flared up, and instantly the huge and
gloomy Tabernacle was hysterical with flames. The crowd rushed toward the exits.

Naturally, most of the original exits of the Tabernacle had been blocked by booths. There was a shrieking panic, and children were being
trampled.

Almus Pickerbaugh was neither a coward nor slothful. Suddenly, coming from nowhere, he was marching through the Tabernacle at the head of his
eight daughters, singing "Dixie," his head up, his eyes terrible, his arms wide in pleading. The crowd weakly halted. With the voice of a clipper
captain he unsnarled them and ushered them safely out, then charged back into the spouting flames.

The rain-soaked building had not caught. The fireman, with Martin and the head of the Eugenic Family, was beating the flames. Nothing was
destroyed save the Clean House, and the crowd which had fled in agony came back in wonder. Their hero was Pickerbaugh.

Within two hours the Nautilus papers vomited specials which explained that not merely had Pickerbaugh organized the greatest lesson in health
ever seen, but he had also, by his courage and his power to command, saved hundreds of people from being crushed, which latter was probably the
only completely accurate thing that has been said about Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh in ten thousand columns of newspaper publicity.

Whether to see the Fair, Pickerbaugh, the delightful ravages of a disaster, or another fight between the anti ladies, half the city struggled
into the Tabernacle that evening, and when Pickerbaugh took the platform for his closing lecture he was greeted with frenzy. Next day, when he
galloped into the last week of his campaign, he was overlord of all the district.


II


His opponent was a snuffy little lawyer whose strength lay in his training. He had been state senator, lieutenant governor, county judge. But the
Democratic slogan, "Pickerbaugh the Pick-up Candidate," was drowned in the admiration for the hero of the health fair. He dashed about in motors,
proclaiming, "I am not running because I want office, but because I want the chance to take to the whole nation my ideals of health." Everywhere
was plastered:


For Congress PICKERBAUGH The two-fisted fighting poet doc

Just elect him for a term And all through the nation he'll swat the germ.


Enormous meetings were held. Pickerbaugh was ample and vague about his Policies. Yes, he was opposed to our entering the European War, but he
assured them, he certainly did assure them, that he was for using every power of our Government to end this terrible calamity. Yes, he was for
high tariff, but it must be so adjusted that the farmers in his district could buy everything cheaply. Yes, he was for high wages for each and
every workman, but he stood like a rock, like a boulder, like a moraine, for protecting the prosperity of all manufacturers, merchants, and real-
estate owners.

While this larger campaign thundered, there was proceeding in Nautilus a smaller and much defter campaign, to re-elect as mayor one Mr. Pugh,
Pickerbaugh's loving chief. Mr. Pugh sat nicely at desks, and he was pleasant and promissory to everybody who came to see him; clergymen,
gamblers, G.A.R. veterans, circus advance-agents, policemen, and ladies of reasonable virtue--everybody except perhaps socialist agitators,
against whom he staunchly protected the embattled city. In his speeches Pickerbaugh commended Pugh for "that firm integrity and ready sympathy
with which His Honor had backed up every movement for the public weal," and when Pickerbaugh (quite honestly) begged, "Mr. Mayor, if I go to
Congress you must appoint Arrowsmith in my place; he knows nothing about politics but he's incorruptible," then Pugh gave his promise, and amity
abode in that land. . . . Nobody said anything at all about Mr. F. X. Jordan.

F. X. Jordan was a contractor with a generous interest in politics. Pickerbaugh called him a grafter, and the last time Pugh had been elected--it
had been on a Reform Platform, though since that time the reform had been coaxed to behave itself and be practical--both Pugh and Pickerbaugh had
denounced Jordan as a "malign force." But so kindly was Mayor Pugh that in the present election he said nothing that could hurt Mr. Jordan's
feelings, and in return what could Mr. Jordan do but speak forgivingly about Mr. Pugh to the people in blind-pigs and houses of ill fame?

On the evening of the election, Martin and Leora were among the company awaiting the returns at the Pickerbaughs'. They were confident. Martin
had never been roused by politics, but he was stirred now by Pickerbaugh's twitchy pretense of indifference, by the telephoned report from the
newspaper office, "Here's Willow Grove township--Pickerbaugh leading, two to one!" by the crowds which went past the house howling, "Pickerbaugh,
Pickerbaugh, Pickerbaugh!"

At eleven the victory was certain, and Martin, his bowels weak with unconfidence, realized that he was now Director of Public Health, with
responsibility for seventy thousand lives.

He looked wistfully toward Leora and in her still smile found assurance.

Orchid had been airy and distant with Martin all evening, and dismayingly chatty and affectionate with Leora. Now she drew him into the back
parlor and "So I'm going off to Washington--and you don't care a bit!" she said, her eyes blurred and languorous and undefended. He held her,
muttering, "You darling child, I can't let you go!" As he walked home he thought less of being Director than of Orchid's eyes.

In the morning he groaned, "Doesn't anybody ever learn anything? Must I watch myself and still be a fool, all my life? Doesn't any story ever
end?"

He never saw her afterward, except on the platform of the train.

Leora surprisingly reflected, after the Pickerbaughs had gone, "Sandy dear, I know how you feel about losing your Orchid. It's sort of Youth
going. She really is a peach. Honestly, I can appreciate how you feel, and sympathize with you--I mean, of course, providin' you aren't ever
going to see her again."


III


Over the Nautilus Cornfield's announcement was the vigorous headline:


ALMUS PICKERBAUGH WINS First Scientist Ever Elected to Congress

Side-kick of Darwin and Pasteur Gives New Punch to Steering Ship of State


Pickerbaugh's resignation was to take effect at once; he was, he explained, going to Washington before his term began, to study legislative
methods and start his propaganda for the creation of a national Secretaryship of Health. There was a considerable struggle over the appointment
of Martin in his stead. Klopchuk the dairyman was bitter; Irving Watters whispered to fellow doctors that Martin was likely to extend the
socialistic free clinics; F. X. Jordan had a sensible young doctor as his own candidate. It was the Ashford Grove Group, Tredgold, Schlemihl,
Monte Mugford, who brought it off.

Martin went to Tredgold worrying, "Do the people want me? Shall I fight Jordan or get out?"

Tredgold said balmily, "Fight? What about? I own a good share of the bank that's lent various handy little sums to Mayor Pugh. You leave it to
me."

Next day Martin was appointed, but only as Acting Director, with a salary of thirty-five hundred instead of four thousand.

That he had been put in by what he would have called "crooked politics" did not occur to him.

Mayor Pugh called him in and chuckled:

"Doc, there's been a certain amount of opposition to you, because you're pretty young and not many folks know you. I haven't any doubt I can give
you the full appointment later--if we find you're competent and popular. Meantime you better avoid doing anything brash. Just come and ask my
advice. I know this town and the people that count better than you do."


IV


The day of Pickerbaugh's leaving for Washington was made a fiesta. At the Armory, from twelve to two, the Chamber of Commerce gave to everybody
who came a lunch of hot wienies, doughnuts, and coffee, with chewing gum for the women and, for the men, Schweinhugel's Little Dandy Nautilus-
made Cheroots.

The train left at three-fifty-five. The station was, to the astonishment of innocent passengers gaping from the train windows, jammed with
thousands.

By the rear platform, on a perilous packing box, Mayor Pugh held forth. The Nautilus Silver Cornet Band played three patriotic selections, then
Pickerbaugh stood on the platform, his family about him. As he looked on the crowd, tears were in his eyes.

"For once," he stammered, "I guess I can't make a speech. D-darn it, I'm all choked up! I meant to orate a lot, but all I can say is--I love you
all, I'm mighty grateful, I'll represent you my level best, neighbors! God bless you!"

The train moved out, Pickerbaugh waving as long as he could see them.

And Martin to Leora, "Oh, he's a fine old boy. He-- No, I'm hanged if he is! The world's always letting people get away with asininities because
they're kind-hearted. And here I've sat back like a coward, not saying a word, and watched 'em loose that wind-storm on the whole country. Oh,
curse it, isn't anything in the world simple? Well, let's go to the office, and I'll begin to do things conscientiously and all wrong."




Chapter 24



It cannot be said that Martin showed any large ability for organization, but under him the Department of Public Health changed completely. He
chose as his assistant Dr. Rufus Ockford, a lively youngster recommended by Dean Silva of Winnemac. The routine work, examination of babies,
quarantines, anti-tuberculosis placarding, went on as before.

Inspection of plumbing and food was perhaps more thorough, because Martin lacked Pickerbaugh's buoyant faith in the lay inspectors, and one of
them he replaced, to the considerable displeasure of the colony of Germans in the Homedale district. Also he gave thought to the killing of rats
and fleas, and he regarded the vital statistics as something more than a recording of births and deaths. He had notions about their value which
were most amusing to the health department clerk. He wanted a record of the effect of race, occupation, and a dozen other factors upon the
disease rate.

The chief difference was that Martin and Rufus Ockford found themselves with plenty of leisure. Martin estimated that Pickerbaugh must have used
half his time in being inspirational and eloquent.

He made his first mistake in assigning Ockford to spend part of the week in the free city clinic, in addition to the two half-time physicians.
There was fury in the Evangeline County Medical Society. At a restaurant, Irving Watters came over to Martin's table.

"I hear you've increased the clinic staff," said Dr. Watters.

"Yuh."

"Thinking of increasing it still more?"

"Might be a good idea."

"Now you see here, Mart. As you know, Mrs. Watters and I have done everything in our power to make you and Leora welcome. Glad to do anything I
can for a fellow alumnus of old Winnemac. But at the same time, there are limits, you know! Not that I've got any objection to your providing
free clinical facilities. Don't know but what it's a good thing to treat the damn', lazy, lousy pauper-class free, and keep the D.B.'s off the
books of the regular physicians. But same TIME, when you begin to make a practice of encouraging a lot of folks, that can afford to pay, to go
and get free treatment, and practically you attack the integrity of the physicians of this city, that have been giving God knows how much of
their time to charity--"

Martin answered neither wisely nor competently: "Irve, sweetheart, you can go straight to hell!"

After that hour, when they met there was nothing said between them.

Without disturbing his routine work, he found himself able to sink blissfully into the laboratory. At first he merely tinkered, but suddenly he
was in full cry, oblivious of everything save his experiment.

He was playing with cultures isolated from various dairies and various people, thinking mostly of Klopchuk and streptococcus. Accidentally he
discovered the lavish production of hemolysin in sheep's blood as compared with the blood of other animals. Why should streptococcus dissolve the
red blood corpuscles of sheep more easily than those of rabbits?

It is true that a busy health-department bacteriologist has no right to waste the public time in being curious, but the irresponsible sniffing
beagle in Martin drove out the faithful routineer.

He neglected the examination of an ominously increasing number of tubercular sputums; he set out to answer the question of the hemolysin. He
wanted the streptococcus to produce its blood-destroying poison in twenty-four-hour cultures.

He beautifully and excitedly failed, and sat for hours meditating. He tried a six-hour culture. He mixed the supernatant fluid from a
centrifugated culture with a suspension of red blood corpuscles and placed it in the incubator. When he returned, two hours later, the blood
cells were dissolved.

He telephoned to Leora: "Lee! Got something! C'n you pack up sandwich and come down here f'r evening?"

"Sure," said Leora.

When she appeared he explained to her that his discovery was accidental, that most scientific discoveries were accidental, and that no
investigator, however great, could do anything more than see the value of his chance results.

He sounded mature and rather angry.

Leora sat in the corner, scratching her chin, reading a medical journal. From time to time she reheated coffee, over a doubtful Bunsen flame.
When the office staff arrived in the morning they found something that had but rarely occurred during the regime of Almus Pickerbaugh: the
Director of the Department was transplanting cultures, and on a long table was his wife, asleep.

Martin blared at Dr. Ockford, "Get t'hell out of this, Rufus, and take charge of the department for today--I'm out--I'm dead--and oh, say, get
Leora home and fry her a couple o' eggs, and you might bring me a Denver sandwich from the Sunset Trail Lunch, will you?"

"You bet, chief," said Ockford.

Martin repeated his experiment, testing the cultures for hemolysin after two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve, fourteen, sixteen, and eighteen
hours of incubation. He discovered that the maximum production of hemolysin occurred between four and ten hours. He began to work out the formula
of production--and he was desolate. He fumed, raged, sweated. He found that his mathematics was childish, and all his science rusty. He pottered
with chemistry, he ached over his mathematics, and slowly he began to assemble his results. He believed that he might have a paper for the
Journal of Infectious Diseases.

Now Almus Pickerbaugh had published scientific papers--often. He had published them in the Midwest Medical Quarterly, of which he was one of
fourteen editors. He had discovered the germ of epilepsy and the germ of cancer--two entirely different germs of cancer. Usually it took him a
fortnight to make the discovery, write the report, and have it accepted. Martin lacked this admirable facility.

He experimented, he re-experimented, he cursed, he kept Leora out of bed, he taught her to make media, and was ill-pleased by her opinions on
agar. He was violent to the stenographer; not once could the pastor of the Jonathan Edwards Congregational Church get him to address the Bible
Class; and still for months his paper was not complete.

The first to protest was His Honor the Mayor. Returning from an extremely agreeable game of chemin de fer with F. X. Jordan, taking a short cut
through the alley behind the City Hall, Mayor Pugh saw Martin at two in the morning drearily putting test-tubes in the incubator, while Leora sat
in a corner smoking. Next day he summoned Martin, and protested.

"Doc, I don't want to butt in on your department--my specialty is never butting in--but it certainly strikes me that after being trained by a
seventy-horse-power booster like Pickerbaugh, you ought to know that it's all damn' foolishness to spend so much time in the laboratory, when you
can hire an A1 laboratory fellow for thirty bucks a week. What you ought to be doing is jollying along these sobs that are always panning the
administration. Get out and talk to the churches and clubs, and help me put across the ideas that we stand for."

"Maybe he's right," Martin considered. "I'm a rotten bacteriologist. Probably I never will get this experiment together. My job here is to keep
tobacco-chewers from spitting. Have I the right to waste the tax-payers' money on anything else?"

But that week he read, as an announcement issued by the McGurk Institute of Biology of New York, that Dr. Max Gottlieb had synthesized antibodies
in vitro.

He pictured the saturnine Gottlieb not at all enjoying the triumph but, with locked door, abusing the papers for their exaggerative reports of
his work; and as the picture became sharp Martin was like a subaltern stationed in a desert isle when he learns that his old regiment is going
off to an agreeable Border war.

Then the McCandless fury broke.


II


Mrs. McCandless had once been a "hired girl"; then nurse, then confidante, then wife to the invalid Mr. McCandless, wholesale grocer and owner of
real estate. When he died she inherited everything. There was a suit, of course, but she had an excellent lawyer.

She was a grim, graceless, shady, mean woman, yet a nymphomaniac. She was not invited into Nautilus society, but in her unaired parlor, on the
mildewed couch, she entertained seedy, belching, oldish married men, a young policeman to whom she often lent money, and the contractor-
politician, F. X. Jordan.

She owned, in Swede Hollow, the filthiest block of tenements in Nautilus. Martin had made a tuberculosis map of these tenements, and in
conferences with Dr. Ockford and Leora he denounced them as murder-holes. He wanted to destroy them, but the police power of the Director of
Public Health was vague. Pickerbaugh had enjoyed the possession of large power only because he never used it.

Martin sought a court decision for the demolition of the McCandless tenements. Her lawyer was also the lawyer of F. X. Jordan, and the most
eloquent witness against Martin was Dr. Irving Watters. But it chanced, because of the absence of the proper judge, that the case came before an
ignorant and honest person who quashed the injunction secured by Mrs. McCandless's lawyer and instructed the Department of Public Health that it
might use such methods as the city ordinances provided for emergencies.

That evening Martin grumbled to young Ockford, "You don't suppose for a moment, do you, Rufus, that McCandless and Jordan won't appeal the case?
Let's get rid of the tenements while it's comparatively legal, heh?"

"You bet, chief," said Ockford, and, "Say, let's go out to Oregon and start practice when we get kicked out. Well, we can depend on our sanitary
inspector, anyway. Jordan seduced his sister, here 'bout six years back."

At dawn a gang headed by Martin and Ockford, in blue overalls, joyful and rowdyish, invaded the McCandless tenements, drove the tenants into the
street, and began to tear down the flimsy buildings. At noon, when lawyers appeared and the tenants were in new flats commandeered by Martin, the
wreckers set fire to the lower stories, and in half an hour the buildings had been annihilated.

F. X. Jordan came to the scene after lunch. A filthy Martin and a dusty Ockford were drinking coffee brought by Leora.

"Well, boys," said Jordan, "you've put it all over us. Only if you ever pull this kind of stunt again, use dynamite and save a lot of time. You
know, I like you boys--I'm sorry for what I've got to do to you. But may the saints help you, because it's just a question of time when I learn
you not to monkey with the buzz-saw."


III


Clay Tredgold admired their amateur arson and rejoiced, "Fine! I'm going to back you up in everything the D.P.H. does."

Martin was not too pleased by the promise, for Tredgold's set were somewhat exigent. They had decided that Martin and Leora were free spirits
like themselves, and amusing, but they had also decided, long before the Arrowsmiths had by coming to Nautilus entered into authentic existence,
that the Group had a monopoly of all Freedom and Amusingness, and they expected the Arrowsmiths to appear for cocktails and poker every Saturday
and Sunday evening. They could not understand why Martin should desire to spend his time in a laboratory, drudging over something called
"streptolysin," which had nothing to do with cocktails, motors, steel windmills, or insurance.

On an evening perhaps a fortnight after the destruction of the McCandless tenements, Martin was working late in the laboratory. He wasn't even
doing experiments which might have diverted the Group--causing bacterial colonies to cloud liquids, or making things change color. He was merely
sitting at a table, looking at logarithmic tables. Leora was not there, and he was mumbling, "Confound her, why did she have to go and be sick
today?"

Tredgold and Schlemihl and their wives were bound for the Old Farmhouse Inn. They had telephoned to Martin's flat and learned where he was. From
the alley behind City Hall they could peer in and see him, dreary and deserted.

"We'll take the old boy out and brighten him up. First, let's rush home and shake up a few cocktails and bring 'em down to surprise him," was
Tredgold's inspiration.

Tredgold came into the laboratory, a half-hour later, with much clamor.

"This is a nice way to put in a moonlit spring evening, young Narrowsmith! Come on, we'll all go out and dance a little. Grab your hat."

"Gosh, Clay, I'd like to, but honestly I can't. I've got to work; simply got to."

"Rats! Don't be silly. You've been working too hard. Here--look what Father's brought. Be reasonable. Get outside of a nice long cocktail and
you'll have a new light on things."

Martin was reasonable up to that point, but he did not have a new light. Tredgold would not take No. Martin continued to refuse, affectionately,
then a bit tartly. Outside, Schlemihl pressed down the button of the motor horn and held it, producing a demanding, infuriating yawp which made
Martin cry, "For God's sake go out and make 'em quit that, will you, and let me alone! I've got to work, I told you!"

Tredgold stared a moment. "I certainly shall! I'm not accustomed to force my attentions on people. Pardon me for disturbing you!"

By the time Martin sulkily felt that he must apologize, the car was gone. Next day and all the week, he waited for Tredgold to telephone, and
Tredgold waited for him to telephone, and they fell into a circle of dislike. Leora and Clara Tredgold saw each other once or twice, but they
were uncomfortable, and a fortnight later, when the most prominent physician in town dined with the Tredgolds and attacked Martin as a bumptious
and narrow-visioned young man, both the Tredgolds listened and agreed.

Opposition to Martin developed all at once.

Various physicians were against him, not only because of the enlarged clinics, but because he rarely asked their help and never their advice.
Mayor Pugh considered him tactless. Klopchuk and F. X. Jordan were assailing him as crooked. The reporters disliked him for his secrecy and
occasional brusqueness. And the Group had ceased to defend him. Of all these forces Martin was more or less aware, and behind them he fancied
that doubtful business men, sellers of impure ice-cream and milk, owners of unsanitary shops and dirty tenements, men who had always hated
Pickerbaugh but who had feared to attack him because of his popularity, were gathering to destroy the entire Department of Public Health. . . .
He appreciated Pickerbaugh in those days, and loved soldier-wise the Department.

There came from Mayor Pugh a hint that he would save trouble by resigning. He would not resign. Neither would he go to the citizens begging for
support. He did his work, and leaned on Leora's assurance, and tried to ignore his detractors. He could not.

News-items and three-line editorial squibs dug at his tyranny, his ignorance, his callowness. An old women died after treatment at the clinic,
and the coroner hinted that it had been the fault of "our almighty health-officer's pet cub assistant." Somewhere arose the name "the Schoolboy
Czar" for Martin, and it stuck.

In the gossip at luncheon clubs, in discussions at the Parents' and Teachers' Association, in one frank signed protest sent to the Mayor, Martin
was blamed for too strict an inspection of milk, for insufficiently strict inspection of milk; for permitting garbage to lie untouched, for
persecuting the overworked garbage collectors; and when a case of small-pox appeared in the Bohemian section, there was an opinion that Martin
had gone out personally and started it.

However vague the citizens were as to the nature of his wickedness, once they lost faith in him they lost it completely and with joy, and they
welcomed an apparently spontaneously generated rumor that he had betrayed his benefactor, their beloved Dr. Pickerbaugh, by seducing Orchid.

At this interesting touch of immorality, he had all the fashionable churches against him. The pastor of the Jonathan Edwards Church touched up a
sermon about Sin in High Places by a reference to "one who, while like a Czar he pretends to be safeguarding the city from entirely imaginary
dangers, yet winks at the secret vice rampant in hidden places; who allies himself with the forces of graft and evil and the thugs who batten on
honest but deluded Labor; one who cannot arise, a manly man among men, and say, 'I have a clean heart and clean hands.'"

It is true that some of the delighted congregation thought that this referred to Mayor Pugh, and others applied it to F. X. Jordan, but wise
citizens saw that it was a courageous attack on that monster of treacherous lewdness, Dr. Arrowsmith.

In all the city there were exactly two ministers who defended him: Father Costello of the Irish Catholic Church and Rabbi Rovine. They were, it
happened, very good friends, and not at all friendly with the pastor of the Jonathan Edwards Church. They bullied their congregations; each of
them asserted, "People come sneaking around with criticisms of our new Director of Health. If you want to make charges, make them openly. I will
not listen to cowardly hints. And let me tell you that this city is lucky in having for health-officer a man who is honest and who actually knows
something!"

But their congregations were poor.

Martin realized that he was lost. He tried to analyze his unpopularity.

"It isn't just Jordan's plotting and Tredgold's grousing and Pugh's weak spine. It's my own fault. I can't go out and soft-soap the people and
get their permission to help keep them well. And I won't tell them what a hell of an important thing my work is--that I'm the one thing that
saves the whole lot of 'em from dying immediately. Apparently an official in a democratic state has to do those things. Well, I don't! But I've
got to think up something or they'll emasculate the whole Department."

One inspiration he did have. If Pickerbaugh were here, he could crush, or lovingly smother, the opposition. He remembered Pickerbaugh's farewell:
"Now, my boy, even if I'm way off there in Washington, this Work will be as close to my heart as it ever was, and if you should really need me,
you just send for me and I'll drop everything and come."

Martin wrote hinting that he was much needed.

Pickerbaugh replied by return mail--good old Pickerbaugh!--but the reply was, "I cannot tell you how grieved I am that I cannot for the moment
possibly get away from Washington but am sure that in your earnestness you exaggerate strength of opposition, write me freely, at any time."

"That's my last shot," Martin said to Leora. "I'm done. Mayor Pugh will fire me, just as soon as he comes back from his fishing trip. I'm a
failure again, darling."

"You're not a failure, and you must eat some of this nice steak, and what shall we do now--time for us to be moving on, anyway--I hate staying in
one place," said Leora.

"I don't know what we'll do. Maybe I could get a job at Hunziker's. Or go back to Dakota and try to work up a practice. What I'd like is to
become a farmer and get me a big shot-gun and drive every earnest Christian citizen off the place. But meantime I'm going to stick here. I might
win yet--with just a couple of miracles and a divine intervention. Oh, God, I am so tired! Are you coming back to the lab with me this evening?
Honest, I'll quit early--before eleven, maybe."

He had completed his paper on the streptolysin research, and he took a day off to go to Chicago and talk it over with an editor of the Journal of
Infectious Diseases. As he left Nautilus he was confused. He had caught himself rejoicing that he was free of Wheatsylvania and bound for great
Nautilus. Time bent back, progress was annihilated, and he was mazed with futility.

The editor praised his paper, accepted it, and suggested only one change. Martin had to wait for his train. He remembered that Angus Duer was in
Chicago, with the Rouncefield Clinic--a private organization of medical specialists, sharing costs and profits.

The clinic occupied fourteen rooms in a twenty-story building constructed (or so Martin certainly remembered it) of marble, gold, and rubies. The
clinic reception-room, focused on a vast stone fireplace, was like the drawing-room of an oil magnate, but it was not a place of leisure. The
young woman at the door demanded Martin's symptoms and address. A page in buttons sped with his name to a nurse, who flew to the inner offices.
Before Angus appeared, Martin had to wait a quarter-hour in a smaller, richer, still more abashing reception-room. By this time he was so awed
that he would have permitted the clinic surgeons to operate on him for any ill which at the moment they happened to fancy.

In medical school and Zenith General Hospital, Angus Duer had been efficient enough, but now he was ten times as self-assured. He was cordial; he
invited Martin to step out for a dish of tea as though he almost meant it; but beside him Martin felt young, rustic, inept.

Angus won him by pondering, "Irving Watters? He was Digam? I'm not sure I remember him. Oh, yes--he was one of these boneheads that are the curse
of every profession."

When Martin had sketched his conflict at Nautilus, Angus suggested, "You better come join us here at Rouncefield, as pathologist. Our pathologist
is leaving in a few weeks. You could do the job, all right. You're getting thirty-five hundred a year now? Well, I think I could get you forty-
five hundred, as a starter, and some day you'd become a regular member of the clinic and get in on all the profits. Let me know if you want it.
Rouncefield told me to dig up a man."

With this resource and with an affection for Angus, Martin returned to Nautilus and open war. When Mayor Pugh returned he did not discharge
Martin, but he appointed over him, as full director, Pickerbaugh's friend, Dr. Bissex, the football coach and health director of Mugford College.

Dr. Bissex first discharged Rufus Ockford, which took five minutes, went out and addressed a Y.M.C.A. meeting, then bustled in and invited Martin
to resign.

"I will like hell!" said Martin. "Come on, be honest, Bissex. If you want to fire me, do it, but let's have things straight. I won't resign, and
if you do fire me I think I'll take it to the courts, and maybe I can turn enough light on you and His Honor and Frank Jordan to keep you from
taking all the guts out of the work here."

"Why, Doctor, what a way to talk! Certainly I won't fire you," said Bissex, in the manner of one who has talked to difficult students and to lazy
football teams. "Stay with us as long as you like. Only, in the interests of economy, I reduce your salary to eight hundred dollars a year!"

"All right, reduce and be damned," said Martin.

It sounded particularly fine and original when he said it, but less so when Leora and he found that, with their rent fixed by their lease, they
could not by whatever mean economies live on less than a thousand a year.

Now that he was free from responsibility he began to form his own faction, to save the Department. He gathered Rabbi Rovine, Father Costello,
Ockford, who was going to remain in town and practice, the secretary of the Labor Council, a banker who regarded Tredgold as "fast," and that
excellent fellow the dentist of the school clinic.

"With people like that behind me, I can do something," he gloated to Leora. "I'm going to stick by it. I'm not going to have the D.P.H. turned
into a Y.M.C.A. Bissex has all of Pickerbaugh's mush without his honesty and vigor. I can beat him! I'm not much of an executive, but I was
beginning to visualize a D.P.H. that would be solid and not gaseous--that would save kids and prevent epidemics. I won't give it up. You watch
me!"

His committee made representations to the Commercial Club, and for a time they were certain that the chief reporter of the Frontiersman was going
to support them, "as soon as he could get his editor over being scared of a row." But Martin's belligerency was weakened by shame, for he never
had enough money to meet his bills, and he was not used to dodging irate grocers, receiving dunning letters, standing at the door arguing with
impertinent bill-collectors. He, who had been a city dignitary a few days before, had to endure, "Come on now, you pay up, you dead beat, or I'll
get a cop!" When the shame had grown to terror, Dr. Bissex suddenly reduced his salary another two hundred dollars.

Martin stormed into the mayor's office to have it out, and found F. X. Jordan sitting with Pugh. It was evident that they both knew of the second
reduction and considered it an excellent joke.

He reassembled his committee. "I'm going to take this into the courts," he raged.

"Fine," said Father Costello; and Rabbi Rovine: "Jenkins, that radical lawyer, would handle the case free."

The wise banker observed, "You haven't got anything to take into the courts till they discharge you without cause. Bissex has a legal right to
reduce your salary all he wants to. The city regulations don't fix the salary of anybody except the Director and the inspectors. You haven't a
thing to say."

With a melodramatic flourish Martin protested, "And I suppose I haven't a thing to say if they wreck the Department!"

"Not a thing, if the city doesn't care."

"Well, I care! I'll starve before I'll resign!"

"You'll starve if you don't resign, and your wife, too. Now here's my plan," said the banker. "You go into private practice here--I'll finance
your getting an office and so on--and when the time comes, maybe in five or ten years from now, we'll all get together again and have you put in
as full Director."

"Ten years of waiting--in NAUTILUS? Nope. I'm licked. I'm a complete failure--at thirty-two! I'll resign. I'll wander on," said Martin.

"I know I'm going to love Chicago," said Leora.


IV


He wrote to Angus Duer. He was appointed pathologist in the Rouncefield Clinic. But, Angus wrote, "they could not at the moment see their way
clear to pay him forty-five hundred a year, though they were glad to go to twenty-five hundred."

Martin accepted.


V


When the Nautilus papers announced that Martin had resigned, the good citizens chuckled, "Resigned? He got kicked out, that's what happened." One
of the papers had an innocent squib:


Probably a certain amount of hypocrisy is inevitable in us sinful human critters, but when a public official tries to pose as a saint while
indulging in every vice, and tries to cover up his gross ignorance and incompetence by pulling political wires, and makes a holy show of himself
by not even doing a first-class job of wire-pulling, then even the cussedest of us old scoundrels begins to holler for the meat-ax.


Pickerbaugh wrote to Martin from Washington:


I greatly regret to hear that you have resigned your post. I cannot tell you how disappointed I am, after all the pains I took in breaking you in
and making you acquainted with my ideals. Bissex informs me that, because of crisis in city finances, he had to reduce your salary temporarily.
Well personally I would rather work for the D.P.H. for nothing a year and earn my keep by being a night watchman than give up the fight for
everything that is decent and constructive. I am sorry. I had a great liking for you, and your defection, your going back to private practice
merely for commercial gain, your selling out for what I presume is a very high emolument, is one of the very greatest blows I have recently had
to sustain.


VI


As they rode up to Chicago Martin thought aloud:

"I never knew I could be so badly licked. I never want to see a laboratory or a public health office again. I'm done with everything but making
money.

"I suppose this Rouncefield Clinic is probably nothing but a gilded boob-trap--scare the poor millionaire into having all the fancy kinds of
examinations and treatments the traffic will bear. I hope it is! I expect to be a commercial-group doctor the rest of my life. I hope I have the
sense to be!

"All wise men are bandits. They're loyal to their friends, but they despise the rest. Why not, when the mass of people despise them if they
AREN'T bandits? Angus Duer had the sense to see this from the beginning, way back in medic school. He's probably a perfect technician as a
surgeon, but he knows you get only what you grab. Think of the years it's taken me to learn what he savvied all the time!

"Know what I'll do? I'll stick to the Rouncefield Clinic till I'm making maybe thirty thousand a year, and then I'll get Ockford and start my own
clinic, with myself as internist and head of the whole shooting-match, and collect every cent I can.

"All right, if what people want is a little healing and a lot of tapestry, they shall have it--and pay for it.

"I never thought I could be such a failure--to become a commercialist and not want to be anything else. And I don't want to be anything else,
believe me! I'm through!"




Chapter 25



Then for a year with each day longer than a sleepless night, yet the whole year speeding without events or seasons or eagerness, Martin was a
faithful mechanic in that most competent, most clean and brisk and visionless medical factory, the Rouncefield Clinic. He had nothing of which to
complain. The clinic did, perhaps, give over-many roentgenological examinations to socially dislocated women who needed children and floor-
scrubbing more than pretty little skiagraphs; they did, perhaps, view all tonsils with too sanguinary a gloom; but certainly no factory could
have been better equipped or more gratifyingly expensive, and none could have routed its raw human material through so many processes so swiftly.
The Martin Arrowsmith who had been supercilious toward Pickerbaugh and old Dr. Winters had for Rouncefield and Angus Duer and the other keen taut
specialists of the clinic only the respect of the poor and uncertain for the rich and shrewd.

He admired Angus's firmness of purpose and stability of habit.

Angus had a swim or a fencing lesson daily; he swam easily and fenced like a still-faced demon. He was in bed before eleven-thirty; he never took
more than one drink a day; and he never read anything or said anything which would not contribute to his progress as a Brilliant Young Surgeon.
His underlings knew that Dr. Duer would not fail to arrive precisely on time, precisely well dressed, absolutely sober, very cool, and
appallingly unpleasant to any nurse who made a mistake or looked for a smile.

Martin would without fear have submitted to the gilded and ardent tonsil-snatcher of the clinic, would have submitted to Angus for abdominal
surgery or to Rouncefield for any operation of the head or neck, providing he was himself quite sure the operation was necessary, but he was
never able to rise to the clinic's faith that any portions of the body without which people could conceivably get along should certainly be
removed at once.

The real flaw in his year of Chicago was that through all his working day he did not live. With quick hands, and one-tenth of his brain, he made
blood counts, did urinalyses and Wassermanns and infrequent necropsies, and all the while he was dead, in a white-tiled coffin. Amid the
blattings of Pickerbaugh and the peepings of Wheatsylvania, he had lived, had fought his environment. Now there was nothing to fight.

After hours, he almost lived. Leora and he discovered the world of book-shops and print-shops and theaters and concerts. They read novels and
history and travel; they talked, at dinners given by Rouncefield or Angus, to journalists, engineers, bankers, merchants. They saw a Russian
play, and heard Mischa Elman, and read Gottlieb's beloved Rabelais. Martin learned to flirt without childishness, and Leora went for the first
time to a hair-dresser and to a manicure, and began her lessons in French. She had called Martin a "lie-hunter," a "truth-seeker." They decided
now, talking it over in their tight little two-and-quarter room flat, that most people who call themselves "truth-seekers"--persons who scurry
about chattering of Truth as though it were a tangible separable thing, like houses or salt or bread--did not so much desire to find Truth as to
cure their mental itch. In novels, these truth-seekers quested the "secret of life" in laboratories which did not seem to be provided with Bunsen
flames or reagents; or they went, at great expense and much discomfort from hot trains and undesirable snakes, to Himalayan monasteries, to learn
from unaseptic sages that the Mind can do all sorts of edifying things if one will but spend thirty or forty years in eating rice and gazing on
one's navel.

To these high matters Martin responded, "Rot!" He insisted that there is no Truth but only many truths; that Truth is not a colored bird to be
chased among the rocks and captured by its tail, but a skeptical attitude toward life. He insisted that no one could expect more than, by
stubbornness or luck, to have the kind of work he enjoyed and an ability to become better acquainted with the facts of that work than the average
job-holder.

His mechanistic philosophy did not persuade him that he was progressing adequately. When he tried to match himself with the experts of the clinic
or with their professional friends, he was even more uncomfortable than he had been under the disconcerting scorn of Dr. Hesselink of Groningen.
At clinic luncheons he met surgeons from London, New York, Boston; men with limousines and social positions and the offensive briskness of the
man who has numerous engagements, or the yet more offensive quietness of the person who is amused by his inferiors; master technicians, readers
of papers at medical congresses, executives and controllers, unafraid to operate before a hundred peering doctors, or to give well-bred and
exceedingly final orders to subordinates; captain-generals of medicine, never doubting themselves, great priests and healers; men mature and wise
and careful and blandly cordial.

In their winged presences, Max Gottlieb seemed an aged fusser, Gustaf Sondelius a mountebank, and the city of Nautilus unworthy of passionate
warfare. As their suave courtesy smothered him, Martin felt like a footman.

In long hours of increasing frankness and lucidity he discussed with Leora the question of "What is this Martin Arrowsmith and whither is he
going?" and he admitted that the sight of the Famous Surgeons disturbed his ancient faith that he was somehow a superior person. It was Leora who
consoled him:

"I've got a lovely description for your dratted Famous Surgeons. You know how polite and important they are, and they smile so carefully? Well,
don't you remember you once said that Professor Gottlieb called all such people like that 'men of measured merriment'?"

He caught up the phrase; they sang it together; and they made of it a beating impish song:

"Men of measured merriment! Men of measured merriment! Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful
smiles, damn the men that run the shops, oh, damn their measured merriment, the men with measured merriment, oh, damn their measured merriment,
and DAMN their careful smiles!"


II


While Martin developed in a jagged way from the boy of Wheatsylvania to mature man, his relations to Leora developed from loyal boy-and-girl
adventurousness to lasting solidity. They had that understanding of each other known only to married people, a few married people, wherein for
all their differences they were as much indissoluble parts of a whole as are the eye and hand. Their identification did not mean that they dwelt
always in rosy bliss. Because he was so intimately fond of her and so sure of her, because anger and eager hot injustices are but ways of
expressing trust, Martin was irritated by her and querulous with her as he would not have endured being with any other woman, any charming
Orchid.

He stalked out now and then after a quarrel, disdaining to answer her, and for hours he left her alone, enjoying the knowledge that he was
hurting her, that she was alone, waiting, perhaps weeping. Because he loved her and also was fond of her, he was annoyed when she was less sleek,
less suave, than the women he encountered at Angus Duer's.

Mrs. Rouncefield was a worthy old waddler--beside her, Leora was shining and exquisite. But Mrs. Duer was of amber and ice. She was a rich young
woman, she dressed with distinction, she spoke with finishing-school mock-melodiousness, she was ambitious, and she was untroubled by the
possession of a heart or a brain. She was, indeed, what Mrs. Irving Watters believed herself to be.

In the simple gorgeousness of the Nautilus smart set, Mrs. Clay Tredgold had petted Leora and laughed at her if she lacked a shoe-buckle or split
an infinitive, but the gold-slippered Mrs. Duer was accustomed to sneer at carelessness with the most courteous and unresentable and unmistakable
sneers.

As they returned by taxicab from the Duers', Martin flared:

"Don't you ever learn anything? I remember once in Nautilus we stopped on a country road and talked till--oh, darn' near dawn, and you were going
to be so energetic, but here we are again tonight, with just the same thing--Good God, couldn't you even take the trouble to notice you had a
spot of soot on your nose tonight? Mrs. Duer noticed it, all right! Why are you so sloppy? Why can't you take a little care? And why can't you
make an effort, anyway, to have something to say? You just sit there at dinner--you just sit and look healthy! Don't you want to help me? Mrs.
Duer will probably help Angus to become president of the American Medical Association, in about twenty years, and by that time I suppose you'll
have me back in Dakota as assistant to Hesselink!"

Leora had been snuggling beside him in the unusual luxury of a taxicab. She sat straight now, and when she spoke she had lost the casual
independence with which she usually regarded life:

"Dear, I'm awfully sorry. I went out this afternoon, I went out and had a facial massage, so as to look nice for you, and then I knew you like
conversation, so I got my little book about modern painting that I bought and I studied it terribly hard, but tonight I just couldn't seem to get
the conversation around to modern painting--"

He was sobbing, with her head on his shoulder, "Oh, you poor, scared, bullied kid, trying to be grown-up with these dollar-chasers!"


III


After the first daze of white tile and bustling cleverness at the Rouncefield Clinic, Martin had the desire to tie up a few loose knots of his
streptolysin research.

When Angus Duer discovered it he hinted, "Look here, Martin, I'm glad you're keeping on with your science, but if I were you I wouldn't, I think,
waste too much energy on mere curiosity. Dr. Rouncefield was speaking about it the other day. We'd be glad to have you do all the research you
want, only we'd like it if you went at something practical. Take for instance: if you could make a tabulation of the blood-counts in a couple of
hundred cases of appendicitis and publish it, that'd get somewhere, and you could sort of bring in a mention of the clinic, and we'd all receive
a little credit--and incidentally maybe we could raise you to three thousand a year then."

This generosity had the effect of extinguishing Martin's desire to do any research whatever.

"Angus is right. What he means is: as a scientist I'm finished. I am. I'll never try to do anything original again."

It was at this time, when Martin had been with the clinic for a year, that his streptolysin paper was published in the Journal of Infectious
Diseases. He gave reprints to Rouncefield and to Angus. They said extremely nice things which showed that they had not read the paper, and again
they suggested his tabulating blood-counts.

He also sent a reprint to Max Gottlieb, at the McGurk Institute of Biology.

Gottlieb wrote to him, in that dead-black spider-web script:


Dear Martin:

I have read your paper with great pleasure. The curves of the relation of hemolysin production to age of culture are illuminating. I have spoken
about you to Tubbs. When are you coming to us--to me? Yor laboratory and diener are waiting for you here. The last thing I want to be is a
mystic, but I feel when I see your fine engraved letterhead of a clinic and a Rouncefield that you should be tired of trying to be a good citizen
and ready to come back to work. We shall be glad, & Dr. Tubbs, if you can come.

Truly yours,

M. Gottlieb.


"I'm simply going to adore New York," said Leora.




Chapter 26



The McGurk Building. A sheer wall, thirty blank stories of glass and limestone, down in the pinched triangle whence New York rules a quarter of
the world.

Martin was not overwhelmed by his first hint of New York; after a year in the Chicago Loop, Manhattan seemed leisurely. But when from the
elevated railroad he beheld the Woolworth Tower, he was exalted. To him architecture had never existed; buildings were larger or smaller bulks
containing more or less interesting objects. His most impassioned architectural comment had been, "There's a cute bungalow; be nice place to
live." Now he pondered, "Like to see that tower every day--clouds and storms behind it and everything--so sort of satisfying."

He came along Cedar Street, among thunderous trucks portly with wares from all the world; came to the bronze doors of the McGurk Building and a
corridor of intemperately colored terracotta, with murals of Andean Indians, pirates booming up the Spanish Main, guarded gold-trains, and the
stout walls of Cartagena. At the Cedar Street end of the corridor, a private street, one block long, was the Bank of the Andes and Antilles (Ross
McGurk, chairman of the board), in whose gold-crusted sanctity red-headed Yankee exporters drew drafts on Quito, and clerks hurled breathless
Spanish at bulky women. A sign indicated, at the Liberty Street end, "Passenger Offices, McGurk Line, weekly sailings for the West Indies and
South America."

Born to the prairies, never far from the sight of the cornfields, Martin was conveyed to blazing lands and portentous enterprises.

One of the row of bronze-barred elevators was labeled "Express to McGurk Institute." He entered it proudly, feeling himself already a part of the
godly association. They rose swiftly, and he had but half-second glimpses of ground glass doors with the signs of mining companies, lumber
companies, Central American railroad companies.

The McGurk Institute is probably the only organization for scientific research in the world which is housed in an office building. It has the
twenty-ninth and thirtieth stories of the McGurk Building, and the roof is devoted to its animal house and to tiled walks along which (above a
world of stenographers and bookkeepers and earnest gentlemen who desire to sell Better-bilt Garments to the golden dons of the Argentine) saunter
rapt scientists dreaming of osmosis in Spirogyra.

Later, Martin was to note that the reception-room of the Institute was smaller, yet more forbiddingly polite, in its white paneling and
Chippendale chairs, than the lobby of the Rouncefield Clinic, but now he was unconscious of the room, of the staccato girl attendant, of
everything except that he was about to see Max Gottlieb, for the first time in five years.

At the door of the laboratory he stared hungrily.

Gottlieb was thin-cheeked and dark as ever, his hawk nose bony, his fierce eyes demanding, but his hair had gone gray, the flesh round his mouth
was sunken, and Martin could have wept at the feebleness with which he rose. The old man peered down at him, his hand on Martin's shoulder, but
he said only:

"Ah! Dis is good. . . . Your laboratory is three doors down the hall. . . . But I object to one thing in the good paper you send me. You say,
'The regularity of the rate at which the streptolysin disappears suggests that an equation may be found--'"

"But it can, sir!"

"Then why did you not make the equation?"

"Well-- I don't know. I wasn't enough of a mathematician."

"Then you should not have published till you knew your math!"

"I-- Look, Dr. Gottlieb, do you really think I know enough to work here? I want terribly to succeed."

"Succeed? I have heard that word. It is English? Oh, yes, it is a word that liddle schoolboys use at the University of Winnemac. It means passing
examinations. But there are no examinations to pass here. . . . Martin, let us be clear. You know something of laboratory technique; you have
heard about dese bacilli; you are not a good chemist, and mathematics--pfui!--most terrible! But you have curiosity and you are stubborn. You do
not accept rules. Therefore I t'ink you will either make a very good scientist or a very bad one, and if you are bad enough, you will be popular
with the rich ladies who rule this city, New York, and you can gif lectures for a living or even become, if you get to be plausible enough, a
college president. So anyvay, it will be interesting."

Half an hour later they were arguing ferociously, Martin asserting that the whole world ought to stop warring and trading and writing and get
straightway into laboratories to observe new phenomena; Gottlieb insisting that there were already too many facile scientists, that the one thing
necessary was the mathematical analysis (and often the destruction) of phenomena already observed.

It sounded bellicose, and all the while Martin was blissful with the certainty that he had come home.

The laboratory in which they talked (Gottlieb pacing the floor, his long arms fantastically knotted behind his thin back; Martin leaping on and
off tall stools) was not in the least remarkable--a sink, a bench with racks of numbered test-tubes, a microscope, a few note-books and hydrogen-
ion charts, a grotesque series of bottles connected by glass and rubber tubes on an ordinary kitchen table at the end of the room--yet now and
then during his tirades Martin looked about reverently.

Gottlieb interrupted their debate: "What work do you want to do here?"

"Why, sir, I'd like to help you, if I can. I suppose you're cleaning up some things on the synthesis of antibodies."

"Yes, I t'ink I can bring immunity reactions under the mass action law. But you are not to help me. You are to do your own work. What do you want
to do? This is not a clinic; wit' patients going through so neat in a row!"

"I want to find a hemolysin for which there's an antibody. There isn't any for streptolysin. I'd like to work with staphylolysin. Would you
mind?"

"I do not care what you do--if you just do not steal my staph cultures out of the ice-box, and if you will look mysterious all the time, so Dr.
Tubbs, our Director, will t'ink you are up to something big. So! I haf only one suggestion: when you get stuck in a problem, I have a fine
collection of detective stories in my office. But no. Should I be serious--this once, when you are just come?

"Perhaps I am a crank, Martin. There are many who hate me. There are plots against me--oh, you t'ink I imagine it, but you shall see! I make many
mistakes. But one thing I keep always pure: the religion of a scientist.

"To be a scientist--it is not just a different job, so that a man should choose between being a scientist and being an explorer or a bond-
salesman or a physician or a king or a farmer. It is a tangle of ver-y obscure emotions, like mysticism, or wanting to write poetry; it makes its
victim all different from the good normal man. The normal man, he does not care much what he does except that he should eat and sleep and make
love. But the scientist is intensely religious--he is so religious that he will not accept quarter-truths, because they are an insult to his
faith.

"He wants that everything should be subject to inexorable laws. He is equal opposed to the capitalists who t'ink their silly money-grabbing is a
system, and to liberals who t'ink man is not a fighting animal; he takes both the American booster and the European aristocrat, and he ignores
all their blithering. Ignores it! All of it! He hates the preachers who talk their fables, but he iss not too kindly to the anthropologists and
historians who can only make guesses, yet they have the nerf to call themselves scientists! Oh, yes, he is a man that all nice good-natured
people should naturally hate!

"He speaks no meaner of the ridiculous faith-healers and chiropractors than he does of the doctors that want to snatch our science before it is
tested and rush around hoping they heal people, and spoiling all the clues with their footsteps; and worse than the men like hogs, worse than the
imbeciles who have not even heard of science, he hates pseudo-scientists, guess-scientists--like these psycho-analysts; and worse than those
comic dream-scientists he hates the men that are allowed in a clean kingdom like biology but know only one text-book and how to lecture to
nincompoops all so popular! He is the only real revolutionary, the authentic scientist, because he alone knows how liddle he knows.

"He must be heartless. He lives in a cold, clear light. Yet dis is a funny t'ing: really, in private, he is not cold nor heartless--so much less
cold than the Professional Optimists. The world has always been ruled by the Philanthropists: by the doctors that want to use therapeutic methods
they do not understand, by the soldiers that want something to defend their country against, by the preachers that yearn to make everybody listen
to them, by the kind manufacturers that love their workers, by the eloquent statesmen and soft-hearted authors--and see once what a fine mess of
hell they haf made of the world! Maybe now it is time for the scientist, who works and searches and never goes around howling how he loves
everybody!

"But once again always remember that not all the men who work at science are scientists. So few! The rest--secretaries, press-agents, camp-
followers! To be a scientist is like being a Goethe: it is born in you. Sometimes I t'ink you have a liddle of it born in you. If you haf, there
is only one t'ing--no, there is two t'ings you must do: work twice as hard as you can, and keep people from using you. I will try to protect you
from Success. It is all I can do. So. . . . I should wish, Martin, that you will be very happy here. May Koch bless you!"


II


Five rapt minutes Martin spent in the laboratory which was to be his--smallish but efficient, the bench exactly the right height, a proper sink
with pedal taps. When he had closed the door and let his spirit flow out and fill that minute apartment with his own essence, he felt secure.

No Pickerbaugh or Rouncefield could burst in here and drag him away to be explanatory and plausible and public; he would be free to work, instead
of being summoned to the package-wrapping and dictation of breezy letters which men call work.

He looked out of the broad window above his bench and saw that he did have the coveted Woolworth Tower, to keep and gloat on. Shut in to a joy of
precision, he would nevertheless not be walled out from flowing life. He had, to the north, not the Woolworth Tower alone but the Singer
Building, the arrogant magnificence of the City Investing Building. To the west, tall ships were riding, tugs were bustling, all the world went
by. Below his cliff, the streets were feverish. Suddenly he loved humanity as he loved the decent, clean rows of test-tubes, and he prayed then
the prayer of the scientist:

"God give me unclouded eyes and freedom from haste. God give me a quiet and relentless anger against all pretense and all pretentious work and
all work left slack and unfinished. God give me a restlessness whereby I may neither sleep nor accept praise till my observed results equal my
calculated results or in pious glee I discover and assault my error. God give me strength not to trust to God!"


III


He walked all the way up to their inconsiderable hotel in the Thirties, and all the way the crowds stared at him--this slim, pale, black-eyed,
beaming young man who thrust among them, half-running, seeing nothing yet in a blur seeing everything: gallant buildings, filthy streets,
relentless traffic, soldiers of fortune, fools, pretty women, frivolous shops, windy sky. His feet raced to the tune of "I've found my work, I've
found my work, I've found my work!"

Leora was awaiting him--Leora whose fate it was ever to wait for him in creaky rocking-chairs in cheapish rooms. As he galloped in she smiled,
and all her thin, sweet body was illumined. Before he spoke she cried:

"Oh, Sandy, I'm so glad!"

She interrupted his room-striding panegyrics on Max Gottlieb, on the McGurk Institute, on New York, on the charms of staphylolysin, by a meek
"Dear, how much are they going to pay you?"

He stopped with a bump. "Gosh! I forgot to ask!"

"Oh!"

"Now you look here! This isn't a Rouncefield Clinic! I hate these buzzards that can't see anything but making money--"

"I know, Sandy. Honestly, I don't care. I was just wondering what kind of a flat we'll be able to afford, so I can begin looking for it. Go on.
Dr. Gottlieb said--"

It was three hours after, at eight, when they went to dinner.


IV


The city of magic was to become to Martin neither a city nor any sort of magic but merely a route: their flat, the subway, the Institute, a
favorite inexpensive restaurant, a few streets of laundries and delicatessens and movie theaters. But tonight it was a fog of wonder. They dined
at the Brevoort, of which Gustaf Sondelius had told him. This was in 1916, before the country had become wholesome and sterile, and the Brevoort
was a tumult of French uniforms, caviar, Louis, dangling neckties, Nuits St. Georges, illustrators, Grand Marnier, British Intelligence officers,
brokers, conversation, and Martell, V.O.

"It's a fine crazy bunch," said Martin. "Do you realize we can stop being respectable now? Irving Watters isn't watching us, or Angus! Would we
be too insane if we had a bottle of champagne?"

He awoke next day to fret that there must be a trick somewhere, as there had been in Nautilus, in Chicago. But as he set to work he seemed to be
in a perfect world. The Institute deftly provided all the material and facilities he could desire--animals, incubators, glassware, cultures,
media--and he had a thoroughly trained technician--"garcon" they called him at the Institute. He really was let alone; he really was encouraged
to do individual work; he really was associated with men who thought not in terms of poetic posters or of two-thousand-dollar operations but of
colloids and sporulation and electrons, and of the laws and energies which governed them.

On his first day there came to greet him the head of the Department of Physiology, Dr. Rippleton Holabird.

Holabird seemed, though Martin had found his name starred in physiological journals, too young and too handsome to be the head of a department: a
tall, slim, easy man with a trim mustache. Martin had been reared in the school of Clif Clawson; he had not realized, till he heard Dr.
Holabird's quick greeting, that a man's voice may be charming without effeminacy.

Holabird guided him through the two floors of the Institute, and Martin beheld all the wonders of which he had ever dreamed. If it was not so
large, McGurk ranked in equipment with Rockefeller, Pasteur, McCormick, Lister. Martin saw rooms for sterilizing glass and preparing media, for
glass-blowing, for the polariscope and the spectroscope, and a steel-and-cement-walled combustion-chamber. He saw a museum of pathology and
bacteriology to which he longed to add. There was a department of publications, whence were issued the Institute reports, and the American
Journal of Geographic Pathology, edited by the Director, Dr. Tubbs; there was a room for photography, a glorious library, an aquarium for the
Department of Marine Biology, and (Dr. Tubbs's own idea) a row of laboratories which visiting foreign scientists were invited to use as their
own. A Belgian biologist and a Portuguese bio-chemist were occupying guest laboratories now, and once, Martin thrilled to learn, Gustaf Sondelius
had been here.

Then Martin saw the Berkeley-Saunders centrifuge.

The principle of the centrifuge is that of the cream-separator. It collects as sediment the solids scattered through a liquid, such as bacteria
in a solution. Most centrifuges are hand- or water-power contrivances the size of a large cocktail-shaker, but this noble implement was four feet
across, electrically driven, the central bowl enclosed in armor plate fastened with levers like a submarine hatch, the whole mounted on a cement
pillar.

Holabird explained, "There're only three of these in existence. They're made by Berkeley-Saunders in England. You know the normal speed, even for
a good centrifuge, is about four thousand revolutions a minute. This does twenty thousand a minute--fastest in the world. Eh?"

"Jove, they do give you the stuff to work with!" gloated Martin. (He really did, under Holabird's handsome influence, say Jove, not Gosh.)

"Yes, McGurk and Tubbs are the most generous men in the scientific world. I think you'll find it very pleasant to be here, Doctor."

"I know I will--shall. And Jove, it's awfully nice of you to take me around this way."

"Can't you see how much I'm enjoying my chance to display my knowledge? There's no form of egotism so agreeable and so safe as being a cicerone.
But we still have the real wonder of the Institute for to behold, Doctor. Down this way."

The real wonder of the Institute had nothing visible to do with science. It was the Hall, in which lunched the staff, and in which occasional
scientific dinners were given, with Mrs. McGurk as hostess. Martin gasped and his head went back as his glance ran from glistening floor to black
and gold ceiling. The Hall rose the full height of the two floors of the Institute. Clinging to the soaring wall, above the dais on which lunched
the Director and the seven heads of departments, was a carved musicians'-gallery. Against the oak paneling of the walls were portraits of the
pontiffs of science, in crimson robes, with a vast mural by Maxfield Parrish, and above all was an electrolier of a hundred globes.

"Gosh--JOVE!" said Martin. "I never knew there was such a room!"

Holabird was generous. He did not smile. "Oh, perhaps it's almost too gorgeous. It's Capitola's pet creation--Capitola is Mrs. Ross McGurk, wife
of the founder; she's really an awfully nice woman but she does love Movements and Associations. Terry Wickett, one of the chemists here, calls
this 'Bonanza Hall.' Yet it does inspire you when you come in to lunch all tired and grubby. Now let's go call on the Director. He told me to
bring you in."

After the Babylonian splendor of the Hall, Martin expected to find the office of Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs fashioned like a Roman bath, but it was,
except for a laboratory bench at one end, the most rigidly business-like apartment he had ever seen.

Dr. Tubbs was an earnest man, whiskered like a terrier, very scholarly, and perhaps the most powerful American exponent of co-operation in
science, but he was also a man of the world, fastidious of boots and waistcoats. He had graduated from Harvard, studied on the Continent, been
professor of pathology in the University of Minnesota, president of Hartford University, minister to Venezuela, editor of the Weekly Statesman
and president of the Sanity League, finally Director of McGurk.

He was a member both of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of the Academy of Sciences. Bishops, generals, liberal rabbis, and musical
bankers dined with him. He was one of the Distinguished Men to whom the newspapers turned for authoritative interviews on all subjects.

You realized before he had talked to you for ten minutes that here was one of the few leaders of mankind who could discourse on any branch of
knowledge, yet could control practical affairs and drive stumbling mankind on to sane and reasonable ideals. Though a Max Gottlieb might in his
research show a certain talent, yet his narrowness, his sour and antic humor, kept him from developing the broad view of education, politics,
commerce, and all other noble matters which marked Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs.

But the Director was as cordial to the insignificant Martin Arrowsmith as though Martin were a visiting senator. He shook his hand warmly; he
unbent in a smile; his baritone was mellow.

"Dr. Arrowsmith, I trust we shall do more than merely say you are welcome here; I trust we shall show you how welcome you are! Dr. Gottlieb tells
me that you have a natural aptitude for cloistered investigation but that you have been looking over the fields of medical practice and public
health before you settled down to the laboratory. I can't tell you how wise I consider you to have made that broad preliminary survey. Too many
would-be scientists lack the tutored vision which comes from coordinating all mental domains."

Martin was dazed to discover that he had been making a broad survey.

"Now you'll doubtless wish to take some time, perhaps a year or more, in getting into your stride, Dr. Arrowsmith. I shan't ask you for any
reports. So long as Dr. Gottlieb feels that you yourself are satisfied with your progress, I shall be content. Only if there is anything in which
I can advise you, from a perhaps somewhat longer career in science, please believe that I shall be delighted to be of aid, and I am quite sure
the same obtains with Dr. Holabird here, though he really ought to be jealous, because he is one of our youngest workers--in fact I call him my
enfant terrible--but you, I believe, are only thirty-three, and you quite put the poor fellow's nose out!"

Holabird merrily suggested, "Oh, no, Doctor, it's been put out long ago. You forget Terry Wickett. He's under forty."

"Oh. HIM!" murmured Dr. Tubbs.

Martin had never heard a man disposed of so poisonously with such politeness. He saw that in Terry Wickett there might be a serpent even in this
paradise.

"Now," said Dr. Tubbs, "perhaps you might like to glance around my place here. I pride myself on keeping our card-indices and letter-files as
unimaginatively as though I were an insurance agent. But there is a certain exotic touch in these charts." He trotted across the room to show a
nest of narrow drawers filled with scientific blue-prints.

Just what they were charts of, he did not say, nor did Martin ever learn.

He pointed to the bench at the end of the room, and laughingly admitted:

"You can see there what an inefficient fellow I really am. I keep asserting that I have given up all the idyllic delights of pathological
research for the less fascinating but so very important and fatiguing cares of the directorship. Yet such is the weakness of genus homo that
sometimes, when I ought to be attending to practical details, I become obsessed by some probably absurd pathological concept, and so ridiculous
am I that I can't wait to hasten down the hall to my regular laboratory--I must always have a bench at hand and an experiment going on. Oh, I'm
afraid I'm not the moral man that I pose as being in public! Here I am married to executive procedure, and still I hanker for my first love,
Milady Science!"

"I think it's fine you still have an itch for it," Martin ventured.

He was wondering just what experiments Dr. Tubbs had been doing lately. The bench seemed rather unused.

"And now, Doctor, I want you to meet the real Director of the Institute--my secretary, Miss Pearl Robbins."

Martin had already noticed Miss Robbins. You could not help noticing Miss Robbins. She was thirty-five and stately, a creamy goddess. She rose to
shake hands--a firm, competent grasp--and to cry in her glorious contralto, "Dr. Tubbs is so complimentary only because he knows that otherwise I
wouldn't give him his afternoon tea. We've heard so much about your cleverness from Dr. Gottlieb that I'm almost afraid to welcome you, Dr.
Arrowsmith, but I do want to."

Then, in a glow, Martin stood in his laboratory looking at the Woolworth Tower. He was dizzy with these wonders--his own wonders, now! In
Rippleton Holabird, so gaily elegant yet so distinguished, he hoped to have a friend. He found Dr. Tubbs somewhat sentimental, but he was moved
by his kindness and by Miss Robbins's recognition. He was in a haze of future glory when his door was banged open by a hard-faced, red-headed,
soft-shirted man of thirty-six or -eight.

"Arrowsmith?" the intruder growled. "My name is Wickett, Terry Wickett. I'm a chemist. I'm with Gottlieb. Well, I noticed the Holy Wren was
showing you the menagerie."

"Dr. Holabird?"

"Him. . . . Well, you must be more or less intelligent, if Pa Gottlieb let you in. How's it starting? Which kind are you going to be? One of the
polite birds that uses the Institute for social climbing and catches him a rich wife, or one of the roughnecks like me and Gottlieb?"

Terry Wickett's croak was as irritating a sound as Martin had ever heard. He answered in a voice curiously like that of Rippleton Holabird:

"I don't think you need to worry. I happen to be married already!"

"Oh, don't let that fret you, Arrowsmith. Divorces are cheap, in this man's town. Well, did the Holy Wren show you Gladys the Tart?"

"Huh?"

"Gladys the Tart, or the Galloping Centrifuge."

"Oh. You mean the Berkeley-Saunders?"

"I do, soul of my soul. Whajuh think of it?"

"It's the finest centrifuge I've ever seen. Dr. Holabird said--"

"Hell, he ought to say something! He went and got old Tubbs to buy it. He just loves it, Holy Wren does."

"Why not? It's the fastest--"

"Sure. Speediest centrifuge in the whole Vereinigten, and made of the best toothpick steel. The only trouble is, it always blows out fuses, and
it spatters the bugs so that you need a gas-mask if you're going to use it. . . . And did you love dear old Tubbsy and the peerless Pearl?"

"I did!"

"Fine. Of course Tubbs is an illiterate jackass but still, at that, he hasn't got persecution-mania, like Gottlieb."

"Look here, Wickett--is it Dr. Wickett?"

"Uh-huh. . . . M.D., Ph.D., but a first-rate chemist just the same."

"Well, Dr. Wickett, it seems to me a shame that a man of your talents should have to associate with idiots like Gottlieb and Tubbs and Holabird.
I've just left a Chicago clinic where everybody is nice and sensible. I'd be glad to recommend you for a job there!"

"Wouldn't be so bad. At least I'd avoid all the gassing at lunch in Bonanza Hall. Well, sorry I got your goat, Arrowsmith, but you look all right
to me."

"Thanks!"

Wickett grinned obscenely--red-headed, rough-faced, wiry--and snorted, "By the way, did Holabird tell you about being wounded in the first month
of the war, when he was a field marshal or a hospital orderly or something in the British Army?"

"He did not! He didn't mention the war!"

"He will! Well, Brer Arrowsmith, I look forward to many happy, happy years together, playing at the feet of Pa Gottlieb. So long. My lab is right
next to yours."

"Fool!" Martin decided, and, "Well, I can stand him as long as I can fall back on Gottlieb and Holabird. But-- The conceited idiot! Gosh, so
Holabird was in the war! Invalided out, I guess. I certainly got back at Wickett on that! 'Did he tell you about his being a jolly old hero in
the blinkin' war?' he said, and I came right back at him, 'I'm sorry to displease you,' I said, 'but Dr. Holabird did not mention the war.' The
idiot! Well, I won't let him worry me."

And indeed, as Martin met the staff at lunch, Wickett was the only one whom he did not find courteous, however brief their greetings. He did not
distinguish among them; for days most of the twenty researchers remained a blur. He confused Dr. Yeo, head of the Department of Biology, with the
carpenter who had come to put up shelves.

The staff sat in Hall at two long tables, one on the dais, one below: tiny insect groups under the massy ceiling. They were not particularly
noble of aspect, these possible Darwins and Huxleys and Pasteurs. None of them were wide-browed Platos. Except for Rippleton Holabird and Max
Gottlieb and perhaps Martin himself, they looked like lunching grocers: brisk featureless young men; thick mustached elders; and wimpish little
men with spectacles, men whose collars did not meet. But there was a steady calm about them; there was, Martin believed, no anxiety over money in
their voices nor any restlessness of envy and scandalous gossip. They talked gravely or frivolously of their work, the one sort of work that,
since it becomes part of the chain of discovered fact, is eternal, however forgotten the worker's name.

As Martin listened to Terry Wickett (rude and slangy as ever, referring to himself as "the boy chemist," speaking of "this gaudy Institute" and
"our trusting new lil brother, Arrowsmith") debating with a slight thin-bearded man--Dr. William T. Smith, assistant in bio-chemistry--the
possibility of increasing the effects of all enzymes by doses of X-rays, as he heard one associate-member vituperate another for his notions of
cell-chemistry and denounce Ehrlich as "the Edison of medical science," Martin perceived new avenues of exciting research; he stood on a
mountain, and unknown valleys, craggy tantalizing paths, were open to his feet.


V


Dr. and Mrs. Rippleton Holabird invited them to dinner, a week after their coming.

As Holabird's tweeds made Clay Tredgold's smartness seem hard and pretentious, so his dinner revealed Angus Duer's affairs in Chicago as
mechanical and joyless and a little anxious. Everyone whom Martin met at the Holabirds' flat was a Somebody, though perhaps a minor Somebody: a
goodish editor or a rising ethnologist; and all of them had Holabird's graceful casualness.

The provincial Arrowsmiths arrived on time, therefore fifteen minutes early. Before the cocktails appeared, in old Venetian glass, Martin
demanded, "Doctor, what problems are you getting after now in your physiology?"

Holabird was transformed into an ardent boy. With a deprecatory "Would you really like to hear about 'em--you needn't be polite, you know!" he
dashed into an exposition of his experiments, drawing sketches on the blank spaces in newspaper advertisements, on the back of a wedding
invitation, on the flyleaf of a presentation novel, looking at Martin apologetically, learned yet gay.

"We're working on the localization of brain functions. I think we've gone beyond Bolton and Flechsig. Oh, it's jolly exciting, exploring the
brain. Look here!"

His swift pencil was sketching the cerebrum; the brain lived and beat under his fingers.

He threw down the paper. "I say, it's a shame to inflict my hobbies on you. Besides, the others are coming. Tell me, how is your work going? Are
you comfortable at the Institute? Do you find you like people?"

"Everybody except-- To be frank, I'm jarred by Wickett."

Generously, "I know. His manner is slightly aggressive. But you mustn't mind him; he's really an extraordinarily gifted biochemist. He's a
bachelor--gives up everything for his work. And he doesn't really mean half the rude things he says. He detests me, among others. Has he
mentioned me?"

"Why, not especially--"

"I have a feeling he goes around saying that I talk about my experiences in the war, which really isn't quite altogether true."

"Yes," in a burst, "he did say that."

"I do rather wish he wouldn't. So sorry to have offended him by going and getting wounded. I'll remember and not do it again! Such a fuss for a
war record as insignificant as mine! What happened was: when the war broke out in '14 I was in England, studying under Sherrington. I pretended
to be a Canadian and joined up with the medical corps and got mine within three weeks and got hoofed out, and that was the end of my magnificent
career! Here's somebody arriving."

His easy gallantry won Martin complete. Leora was equally captivated by Mrs. Holabird, and they went home from the dinner in new enchantment.

So began for them a white light of happiness. Martin was scarce more blissful in his undisturbed work than in his life outside the laboratory.

All the first week he forgot to ask what his salary was to be. Then it became a game to wait until the end of the month. Evenings, in little
restaurants, Leora and he would speculate about it.

The Institute would surely not pay him less than the twenty-five hundred dollars a year he had received at the Rouncefield Clinic, but on
evenings when he was tired it dropped to fifteen hundred, and one evening when they had Burgundy he raised it to thirty-five hundred.

When his first monthly check came, neat in a little sealed envelope, he dared not look at it. He took it home to Leora. In their hotel room they
stared at the envelope as though it was likely to contain poison. Martin opened it shakily; he stared, and whispered, "Oh, those decent people!
They're paying me--this is for four hundred and twenty dollars--they're paying me five thousand a year!"

Mrs. Holabird, a white kitten of a woman, helped Leora find a three-room flat with a spacious living-room, in an old house near Gramercy Park,
and helped her furnish it with good bits, second-hand. When Martin was permitted to look he cried, "I hope we stay here for fifty years!"

This was the Grecian isle where they found peace. Presently they had friends: the Holabirds, Dr. Billy Smith--the thin-bearded bio-chemist, who
had an intelligent taste in music and German beer--an anatomist whom Martin met at a Winnemac alumni dinner, and always Max Gottlieb.

Gottlieb had found his own serenity. In the Seventies he had a brown small flat, smelling of tobacco and leather books. His son Robert had
graduated from City College and gone bustlingly into business. Miriam kept up her music while she guarded her father--a dumpling of a girl, holy
fire behind the deceptive flesh. After an evening of Gottlieb's acrid doubting, Martin was inspired to hasten to the laboratory and attempt a
thousand new queries into the laws of micro-organisms, a task which usually began with blasphemously destroying all the work he had recently
done.

Even Terry Wickett became more tolerable. Martin perceived that Wickett's snarls were partly a Clif Clawson misconception of humor, but partly a
resentment, as great as Gottlieb's, of the morphological scientists who ticket things with the nicest little tickets, who name things and rename
them and never analyze them. Wickett often worked all night; he was to be seen in shirt-sleeves, his sulky red hair rumpled, sitting with a stop-
watch before a constant temperature bath for hours. Now and then it was a relief to have the surly intentness of Wickett instead of the elegance
of Rippleton Holabird, which demanded from Martin so much painful elegance in turn, at a time when he was sunk beyond sounding in his
experimentation.




Chapter 27



His work began fumblingly. There were days when, for all the joy of it, he dreaded lest Tubbs stride in and bellow, "What are you doing here?
You're the wrong Arrowsmith! Get out!"

He had isolated twenty strains of staphylococcus germs and he was testing them to discover which of them was most active in producing a
hemolytic, a blood-disintegrating toxin, so that he might produce an antitoxin.

There were picturesque moments when, after centrifuging, the organisms lay in coiling cloudy masses at the bottoms of the tubes; or when the red
corpuscles were completely dissolved and the opaque brick-red liquid turned to the color of pale wine. But most of the processes were
incomparably tedious: removing samples of the culture every six hours, making salt suspensions of corpuscles in small tubes, recording the
results.

He never knew they were tedious.

Tubbs came in now and then, found him busy, patted his shoulder, said something which sounded like French and might even have been French, and
gave vague encouragement; while Gottlieb imperturbably told him to go ahead, and now and then stirred him by showing his own note-books (they
were full of figures and abbreviations, stupid-seeming as invoices of calico) or by speaking of his own work, in a vocabulary as heathenish as
Tibetan magic:

"Arrhenius and Madsen have made a contribution toward bringing immunity reactions under the mass action law, but I hope to show that antigen-
antibody combinations occur in stoicheiometric proportions when certain variables are held constant."

"Oh, yes, I see," said Martin; and to himself: "Well, I darn near a quarter understand that! Oh, Lord, if they'll only give me a little time and
not send me back to tacking up diphtheria posters!"

When he had obtained a satisfactory toxin, Martin began his effort to find an antitoxin. He made vast experiments with no results. Sometimes he
was certain that he had something, but when he rechecked his experiments he was bleakly certain that he hadn't. Once he rushed into Gottlieb's
laboratory with the announcement of the antitoxin, whereupon with affection and several discomforting questions and the present of a box of real
Egyptian cigarettes, Gottlieb showed him that he had not considered certain dilutions.

With all his amateurish fumbling, Martin had one characteristic without which there can be no science: a wide-ranging, sniffing, snuffling,
undignified, unself-dramatizing curiosity, and it drove him on.


II


While he puttered his insignificant way through the early years of the Great European War, the McGurk Institute had a lively existence under its
placid surface.

Martin may not have learned much in the matter of antibodies but he did learn the secret of the Institute, and he saw that behind all its quiet
industriousness was Capitola McGurk, the Great White Uplifter.

Capitola, Mrs. Ross McGurk, had been opposed to woman suffrage--until she learned that women were certain to get the vote--but she was a complete
controller of virtuous affairs.

Ross McGurk had bought the Institute not only to glorify himself but to divert Capitola and keep her itching fingers out of his shipping and
mining and lumber interests, which would not too well have borne the investigations of a Great White Uplifter.

Ross McGurk was at the time a man of fifty-four, second generation of California railroad men; a graduate of Yale; big, suave, dignified,
cheerful, unscrupulous. Even in 1908, when he had founded the Institute, he had had too many houses, too many servants, too much food, and no
children, because Capitola considered "that sort of thing detrimental to women with large responsibilities." In the Institute he found each year
more satisfaction, more excuse for having lived.

When Gottlieb arrived, McGurk went up to look him over. McGurk had bullied Dr. Tubbs now and then; Tubbs was compelled to scurry to his office as
though he were a messenger boy; yet when he saw the saturnine eyes of Gottlieb, McGurk looked interested; and the two men, the bulky, clothes-
conscious, powerful, reticent American and the cynical, simple, power-despising European, became friends. McGurk would slip away from a
conference affecting the commerce of a whole West Indian island to sit on a high stool, silent, and watch Gottlieb work.

"Some day when I quit hustling and wake up, I'm going to become your garcon, Max," said McGurk, and Gottlieb answered, "I don't know--you haf
imagination, Ross, but I t'ink you are too late to get a training in reality. Now if you do not mind eating at Childs's, we will avoid your very
expostulatory Regal Hall, and I shall invite you to lunch."

But Capitola did not join their communion.

Gottlieb's arrogance had returned, and with Capitola McGurk he needed it. She had such interesting little problems for her husband's pensioners
to attack. Once, in excitement, she visited Gottlieb's laboratory to tell him that large numbers of persons die of cancer, and why didn't he drop
this anti-whatever-it-was and find a cure for cancer, which would be ever so nice for all of them.

But her real grievance arose when, after Rippleton Holabird had agreed to give midnight supper on the roof of the Institute to one of her most
intellectual dinner-parties, she telephoned to Gottlieb, merely asking, "Would it be too much trouble for you to go down and open your lab, so we
can all enjoy just a tiny peep at it?" and he answered:

"It would! Good night!"

Capitola protested to her husband. He listened--at least he seemed to listen--and remarked:

"Cap, I don't mind your playing the fool with the footmen. They've got to stand it. But if you get funny with Max, I'll simply shut up the whole
Institute, and then you won't have anything to talk about at the Colony Club. And it certainly does beat the deuce that a man worth thirty
million dollars--at least a fellow that's got that much--can't find a clean pair of pajamas. No, I WON'T have a valet! Oh, please now, Capitola,
please quit being high-minded and let me go to sleep, will you!"

But Capitola was uncontrollable, especially in the matter of the monthly dinners which she gave at the Institute.


III


The first of the McGurk Scientific Dinners which Martin and Leora witnessed was a particularly important and explanatory dinner, because the
guest of honor was Major-General Sir Isaac Mallard, the London surgeon, who was in America with a British War Mission. He had already beautifully
let himself be shown through the Institute; he had been Sir Isaac'd by Dr. Tubbs and every researcher except Terry Wickett; he remembered meeting
Rippleton Holabird in London, or said he remembered; and he admired Gladys the Centrifuge.

The dinner began with one misfortune in that Terry Wickett, who hitherto could be depended upon to stay decently away, now appeared, volunteering
to the wife of an ex-ambassador, "I simply couldn't duck this spread, with dear Sir Isaac coming. Say, if I hadn't told you, you wouldn't hardly
think my dress-suit was rented, would you! Have you noticed that Sir Isaac is getting so he doesn't tear the carpet with his spurs any more? I
wonder if he still kills all his mastoid patients?"

There was vast music, vaster food; there were uncomfortable scientists explaining to golden cooing ladies, in a few words, just what they were up
to and what in the next twenty years they hoped to be up to; there were the cooing ladies themselves, observing in tones of pretty rebuke, "But
I'm afraid you haven't yet made it as clear as you might." There were the cooing ladies' husbands--college graduates, manipulators of oil stocks
or of corporation law--who sat ready to give to anybody who desired it their opinion that while antitoxins might be racy, what we really needed
was a good substitute for rubber.

There was Rippleton Holabird, being charming.

And in the pause of the music, there suddenly was Terry Wickett, saying to quite an important woman, one of Capitola's most useful friends, "Yes,
his name is spelled G-o-t-t-l-i-e-b but it's pronounced Gottdamn."

But such outsiders as Wickett and such silent riders as Martin and Leora and such totally absent members as Max Gottlieb were few, and the dinner
waxed magnificently to a love-feast when Dr. Tubbs and Sir Isaac Mallard paid compliments to each other, to Capitola, to the sacred soil of
France, to brave little Belgium, to American hospitality, to British love of privacy, and to the extremely interesting things a young man with a
sense of co-operation might do in modern science.

The guests were conducted through the Institute. They inspected the marine biology aquarium, the pathological museum, and the animal house, at
sight of which one sprightly lady demanded of Wickett, "Oh, the poor little guinea pigs and darling rabbicks! Now honestly, Doctor, don't you
think it would be ever so much nicer if you let them go free, and just worked with your test-tubes?"

A popular physician, whose practice was among rich women, none of them west of Fifth Avenue, said to the sprightly lady, "I think you're
absolutely right. I never have to kill any poor wee little beasties to get my knowledge!"

With astounding suddenness Wickett took his hat and went away.

The sprightly lady said, "You see, he didn't dare stand up to a real argument. Oh, Dr. Arrowsmith, of course I know how wonderful Ross McGurk and
Dr. Tubbs and all of you are, but I must say I'm disappointed in your laboratories. I'd expected there'd be such larky retorts and electric
furnaces and everything but, honestly, I don't see a single thing that's interesting, and I do think all you clever people ought to do SOMETHING
for us, now that you've coaxed us all the way down here. Can't you or somebody create life out of turtle eggs, or whatever it is? Oh, please do!
Pretty please! Or at least, do put on one of these cunnin' dentist coats that you wear."

Then Martin also went rapidly away, accompanied by a furious Leora, who in the taxicab announced that she had desired to taste the champagne-cup
which she had observed on the buffet, and that her husband was little short of a fool.


IV


Thus, however satisfying his work, Martin began to wonder about the perfection of his sanctuary; to wonder why Gottlieb should be so insulting at
lunch to neat Dr. Sholtheis, the industrious head of the Department of Epidemiology, and why Dr. Sholtheis should endure the insults; to wonder
why Dr. Tubbs, when he wandered into one's laboratory, should gurgle, "The one thing for you to keep in view in all your work is the ideal of co-
operation"; to wonder why so ardent a physiologist as Rippleton Holabird should all day long be heard conferring with Tubbs instead of sweating
at his bench.

Holabird had, five years before, done one bit of research which had taken his name into scientific journals throughout the world: he had studied
the effect of the extirpation of the anterior lobes of a dog's brain on its ability to find its way through the laboratory. Martin had read of
that research before he had thought of going to McGurk; on his arrival he was thrilled to have it chronicled by the master himself; but when he
had heard Holabird refer to it a dozen times he was considerably less thrilled, and he speculated whether all his life Holabird would go on being
"the man--YOU remember--the chap that did the big stunt, whatever it was, with locomotion in dogs or something."

Martin speculated still more as he perceived that all his colleagues were secretly grouped in factions.

Tubbs, Holabird, and perhaps Tubbs's secretary, Pearl Robbins, were the ruling caste. It was murmured that Holabird hoped some day to be made
Assistant Director, an office which was to be created for him. Gottlieb, Terry Wickett, and Dr. Nicholas Yeo, that long-mustached and rustic
biologist whom Martin had first taken for a carpenter, formed an independent faction of their own, and however much he disliked the boisterous
Wickett, Martin was dragged into it.

Dr. William Smith, with his little beard and a notion of mushrooms formed in Paris, kept to himself. Dr. Sholtheis, who had been born to a
synagogue in Russia but who was now the most zealous high-church Episcopalian in Yonkers, was constantly in his polite small way trying to have
his scientific work commended by Gottlieb. In the Department of Bio-Physics, the good-natured chief was reviled and envied by his own assistant.
And in the whole Institute there was not one man who would, in all states of liquor, assert that the work of any other scientist anywhere was
completely sound, or that there was a single one of his rivals who had not stolen ideas from him. No rocking-chair clique on a summer-hotel
porch, no knot of actors, ever whispered more scandal or hinted more warmly of complete idiocy in their confreres than did these uplifted
scientists.

But these discoveries Martin could shut out by closing his door, and he had that to do now which deafened him to the mutters of intrigue.


V


For once Gottlieb did not amble into his laboratory but curtly summoned him. In a corner of Gottlieb's office, a den opening from his laboratory,
was Terry Wickett, rolling a cigarette and looking sardonic.

Gottlieb observed, "Martin, I haf taken the privilege of talking you over with Terry, and we concluded that you haf done well enough now so it is
time you stop puttering and go to work."

"I thought I was working, sir!"

All the wide placidness of his halcyon days was gone; he saw himself driven back to Pickerbaughism.

Wickett intruded, "No, you haven't. You've just been showing that you're a bright boy who might work if he only knew something."

While Martin turned on Wickett with a "Who the devil are you?" expression, Gottlieb went on:

"The fact is, Martin, you can do nothing till you know a little mathematics. If you are not going to be a cookbook bacteriologist, like most of
them, you must be able to handle some of the fundamentals of science. All living things are physicochemical machines. Then how can you make
progress if you do not know physical chemistry, and how can you know physical chemistry without much mathematics?"

"Yuh," said Wickett, "you're lawn-mowing and daisy-picking, not digging."

Martin faced them. "But rats, Wickett, a man can't know everything. I'm a bacteriologist, not a physicist. Strikes me a fellow ought to use his
insight, not just a chest of tools, to make discoveries. A good sailor could find his way at sea even if he didn't have instruments, and a whole
Lusitania-ful of junk wouldn't make a good sailor out of a dub. Man ought to develop his brain, not depend on tools."

"Ye-uh, but if there were charts and quadrants in existence, a sailor that cruised off without 'em would be a chump!"

For half an hour Martin defended himself, not too politely, before the gem-like Gottlieb, the granite Wickett. All the while he knew that he was
sickeningly ignorant.

They ceased to take interest. Gottlieb was looking at his notebooks, Wickett was clumping off to work. Martin glared at Gottlieb. The man meant
so much that he could be furious with him as he would have been with Leora, with his own self.

"I'm sorry you think I don't know anything," he raged, and departed with the finest dramatic violence. He slammed into his own laboratory, felt
freed, then wretched. Without volition, like a drunken man, he stormed to Wickett's room, protesting, "I suppose you're right. My physical
chemistry is nix, and my math rotten. What am I going to do--what am I going to do?"

The embarrassed barbarian grumbled, "Well, for Pete's sake, Slim, don't worry. The old man and I were just egging you on. Fact is, he's tickled
to death about the careful way you're starting in. About the math--probably you're better off than the Holy Wren and Tubbs right now; you've
forgotten all the math you ever knew, and they never knew any. Gosh all fishhooks! Science is supposed to mean Knowledge--from the Greek, a
handsome language spoken by the good old booze-hoisting Hellenes--and the way most of the science boys resent having to stop writing little
jeweled papers or giving teas and sweat at getting some knowledge certainly does make me a grand booster for the human race. My own math isn't
any too good, Slim, but if you'd like to have me come around evenings and tutor you-- Free, I mean!"

Thus began the friendship between Martin and Terry Wickett; thus began a change in Martin's life whereby he gave up three or four hours of
wholesome sleep each night to grind over matters which everyone is assumed to know, and almost everyone does not know.

He took up algebra; found that he had forgotten most of it; cursed over the competition of the indefatigable A and the indolent B who walk from Y
to Z; hired a Columbia tutor; and finished the subject, with a spurt of something like interest in regard to quadratic equations, in six weeks .
. . while Leora listened, watched, waited, made sandwiches, and laughed at the tutor's jokes.

By the end of his first nine months at McGurk, Martin had reviewed trigonometry and analytic geometry and he was finding differential calculus
romantic. But he made the mistake of telling Terry Wickett how much he knew.

Terry croaked, "Don't trust math too much, son," and he so confused him with references to the thermo-dynamical derivation of the mass action
law, and to the oxidation reduction potential, that he stumbled again into raging humility, again saw himself an impostor and a tenth-rater.

He read the classics of physical science: Copernicus and Galileo, Lavoisier, Newton, LaPlace, Descartes, Faraday. He became completely bogged in
Newton's "Fluxions"; he spoke of Newton to Tubbs and found that the illustrious Director knew nothing about him. He cheerfully mentioned this to
Terry, and was shockingly cursed for his conceit as a "nouveau cultured," as a "typical enthusiastic convert," and so returned to the work whose
end is satisfying because there is never an end.

His life did not seem edifying nor in any degree amusing. When Tubbs peeped into his laboratory he found a humorless young man going about his
tests of hemolytic toxins with no apparent flair for the Real Big Thing in Science, which was co-operation and being efficient. Tubbs tried to
set him straight with "Are you quite sure you're following a regular demarked line in your work?"

It was Leora who bore the real tedium.

She sat quiet (a frail child, only up to one's shoulder, not nine minutes older than at marriage, nine years before), or she napped
inoffensively, in the long living-room of their flat, while he worked over his dreary digit-infested books till one, till two, and she politely
awoke to let him worry at her, "But look here now, I've got to keep up my research at the same time. God, I am so tired!"

She dragged him away for an illegal five-day walk on Cape Cod, in March. He sat between the Twin Lights at Chatham, and fumed, "I'm going back
and tell Terry and Gottlieb they can go to the devil with their crazy physical chemistry. I've had enough, now I've done math," and she
commented, "Yes, I certainly would--though isn't it funny how Dr. Gottlieb always seems to be right?"

He was so absorbed in staphylolysin and in calculus that he did not realize the world was about to be made safe for democracy. He was a little
dazed when America entered the war.


VI


Dr. Tubbs dashed to Washington to offer the services of the Institute to the War Department.

All the members of the staff, except Gottlieb and two others who declined to be so honored, were made officers and told to run out and buy nice
uniforms.

Tubbs became a Colonel, Rippleton Holabird a Major, Martin and Wickett and Billy Smith were Captains. But the garcons had no military rank
whatever, nor any military duties except the polishing of brown riding-boots and leather puttees, which the several warriors wore as pleased
their fancies or their legs. And the most belligerent of all, Miss Pearl Robbins, she who at tea heroically slaughtered not only German men but
all their women and viperine children, was wickedly unrecognized and had to make up a uniform for herself.

The only one of them who got nearer to the front than Liberty Street was Terry Wickett, who suddenly asked for leave, was transferred to the
artillery, and sailed off to France.

He apologized to Martin: "I'm ashamed of chucking my work like this, and I certainly don't want to kill Germans--I mean not any more'n I want to
kill most people--but I never could resist getting into a big show. Say, Slim, keep an eye on Pa Gottlieb, will you? This has hit him bad. He's
got a bunch of nephews and so on in the German army, and the patriots like Big Foot Pearl will give an exhibit of idealism by persecuting him. So
long, Slim, take care y'self."

Martin had vaguely protested at being herded into the army. The war was to him chiefly another interruption to his work, like Pickerbaughism,
like earning his living at Wheatsylvania. But when he had gone strutting forth in uniform, it was so enjoyable that for several weeks he was a
standard patriot. He had never looked so well, so taut and erect, as in khaki. It was enchanting to be saluted by privates, quite as enchanting
to return the salute in the dignified, patronizing, all-comrades-together splendor which Martin shared with the other doctors, professors,
lawyers, brokers, authors, and former socialist intellectuals who were his fellow-officers.

But in a month the pleasures of being a hero became mechanical, and Martin longed for soft shirts, easy shoes, and clothes with reasonable
pockets. His puttees were a nuisance to wear and an inferno to put on; his collar pinched his neck and jabbed his chin; and it was wearing on a
man who sat up till three, on the perilous duty of studying calculus, to be snappy at every salute.

Under the martinet eye of Col. Director Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs he had to wear his uniform, at least recognizable portions of it, at the Institute,
but by evening he slipped into the habit of sneaking into citizen clothes, and when he went with Leora to the movies he had an agreeable feeling
of being Absent Without Leave, of risking at every street corner arrest by the Military Police and execution at dawn.

Unfortunately no M.P. ever looked at him. But one evening when in an estimable and innocent manner he was looking at the remains of a gunman who
had just been murdered by another gunman, he realized that Major Rippleton Holabird was standing by, glaring. For once the Major was unpleasant:

"Captain, does it seem to you that this is quite playing the game, to wear mufti? We, unfortunately, with our scientific work, haven't the
privilege of joining the Boys who are up against the real thing, but we are under orders just as if we were in the trenches--where SOME of us
would so much like to be again! Captain, I trust I shall never again see you breaking the order about being in uniform, or--uh--"

Martin blurted to Leora, later:

"I'm sick of hearing about his being wounded. Nothing that I can see to prevent his going back to the trenches. Wound's all right now. I want to
be patriotic, but my patriotism is chasing antitoxins, doing my job, not wearing a particular kind of pants and a particular set of ideas about
the Germans. Mind you, I'm anti-German all right--I think they're probably just as bad as we are. Oh, let's go back and do some more calculus. .
. . Darling, my working nights doesn't bore you too much, does it?"

Leora had cunning. When she could not be enthusiastic, she could be unannoyingly silent.

At the Institute Martin perceived that he was not the only defender of his country who was not comfortable in the garb of heroes. The most dismal
of the staff-members was Dr. Nicholas Yeo, the Yankee sandy-mustached head of the Department of Biology.

Yeo had put on Major's uniform, but he never felt neighborly with it. (He knew he was a Major, because Col. Dr. Tubbs had told him he was, and he
knew that this was a Major's uniform because the clothing salesman said so.) He walked out of the McGurk Building in a melancholy, deprecatory
way, with one breeches leg bulging over his riding-boots; and however piously he tried, he never remembered to button his blouse over the violet-
flowered shirts which, he often confided, you could buy ever so cheap on Eighth Avenue.

But Major Dr. Yeo had one military triumph. He hoarsely explained to Martin, as they were marching to the completely militarized dining-hall:

"Say, Arrowsmith, do you ever get balled up about this saluting? Darn it, I never can figure out what all these insignia mean. One time I took a
Salvation Army Lieutenant for a Y.M.C.A. General, or maybe he was a Portygee. But I've got the idea now!" Yeo laid his finger beside his large
nose, and produced wisdom: "Whenever I see any fellow in uniform that looks older than I am, I salute him--my nephew, Ted, has drilled me so I
salute swell now--and if he don't salute back, well, Lord, I just think about my work and don't fuss. If you look at it scientifically, this
military life isn't so awful' hard after all!"


VII


Always, in Paris or in Bonn, Max Gottlieb had looked to America as a land which, in its freedom from Royalist tradition, in its contact with
realities of cornfields and blizzards and town-meetings, had set its face against the puerile pride of war. He believed that he had ceased to be
a German, now, and become a countryman of Lincoln.

The European War was the one thing, besides his discharge from Winnemac, which had ever broken his sardonic serenity. In the war he could see no
splendor nor hope, but only crawling tragedy. He treasured his months of work and good talk in France, in England, in Italy; he loved his French
and English and Italian friends as he loved his ancient Korpsbruder, and very well indeed beneath his mocking did he love the Germans with whom
he had drudged and drunk.

His sister's sons--on home-craving vacations he had seen them, in babyhood, in boyhood, in ruffling youngmanhood--went out with the Kaiser's
colors in 1914; one of them became an Oberst, much decorated, one existed insignificantly, and one was dead and stinking in ten days. This he
sadly endured, as later he endured his son Robert's going out as an American lieutenant, to fight his own cousins. What struck down this man to
whom abstractions and scientific laws were more than kindly flesh was the mania of hate which overcame the unmilitaristic America to which he had
emigrated in protest against Junkerdom.

Incredulously he perceived women asserting that all Germans were baby-killers, universities barring the language of Heine, orchestras outlawing
the music of Beethoven, professors in uniform bellowing at clerks, and the clerks never protesting.

It is uncertain whether the real hurt was to his love for America or to his egotism, that he should have guessed so grotesquely; it is curious
that he who had so denounced the machine-made education of the land should yet have been surprised when it turned blithely to the old, old,
mechanical mockeries of war.

When the Institute sanctified the war, he found himself regarded not as the great and impersonal immunologist but as a suspect German Jew.

True, the Terry who went off to the artillery did not look upon him dourly, but Major Rippleton Holabird became erect and stiff when they passed
in the corridor. When Gottlieb insisted to Tubbs at lunch, "I am villing to admit every virtue of the French--I am very fond of that so
individual people--but on the theory of probabilities I suggest that there must be some good Germans out of sixty millions," then Col. Dr. Tubbs
commanded, "In this time of world tragedy, it does not seem to me particularly becoming to try to be flippant, Dr. Gottlieb!"

In shops and on the elevated train, little red-faced sweaty people when they heard his accent glared at him, and growled one to another, "There's
one of them damn' barb'rous well-poisoning Huns!" and however contemptuous he might be, however much he strove for ignoring pride, their nibbling
reduced him from arrogant scientist to an insecure, raw-nerved, shrinking old man.

And once a hostess who of old time had been proud to know him, a hostess whose maiden name was Straufnabel and who had married into the famous
old Anglican family of Rosemont when Gottlieb bade her "Auf Wiedersehen" cried out upon him, "Dr. Gottlieb, I'm very sorry, but the use of that
disgusting language is not permitted in this house!"

He had almost recovered from the anxieties of Winnemac and the Hunziker factory; he had begun to expand, to entertain people--scientists,
musicians, talkers. Now he was thrust back into himself. With Terry gone, he trusted only Miriam and Martin and Ross McGurk; and his deep-set
wrinkle-lidded eyes looked ever on sadness.

But he could still be tart. He suggested that Capitola ought to have in the window of her house a Service Flag with a star for every person at
the Institute who had put on uniform.

She took it quite seriously, and did it.


VIII


The military duties of the McGurk staff did not consist entirely in wearing uniforms, receiving salutes, and listening to Col. Dr. Tubbs's
luncheon lectures on "the part America will inevitably play in the reconstruction of a Democratic Europe."

They prepared sera; the assistant in the Department of Bio-Physics was inventing electrified wire entanglements; Dr. Billy Smith, who six months
before had been singing Studentenlieder at Luchow's, was working on poison gas to be used against all singers of Lieder; and to Martin was
assigned the manufacture of lipovaccine, a suspension of finely ground typhoid and paratyphoid organisms in oil. It was a greasy job, and dull.
Martin was faithful enough about it, and gave to it almost every morning, but he blasphemed more than usual and he unholily welcomed scientific
papers in which lipovaccines were condemned as inferior to ordinary salt solutions.

He was conscious of Gottlieb's sorrowing and tried to comfort him.

It was Martin's most pitiful fault that he was not very kind to shy people and lonely people and stupid old people; he was not cruel to them, he
simply was unconscious of them or so impatient of their fumbling that he avoided them. Whenever Leora taxed him with it he grumbled:

"Well, but--I'm too much absorbed in my work, or in doping stuff out, to waste time on morons. And it's a good thing. Most people above the grade
of hog do so much chasing around after a lot of vague philanthropy that they never get anything done--and most of your confounded shy people get
spiritually pauperized. Oh, it's so much easier to be good-natured and purring and self-congratulatory and generally footless than it is to pound
ahead and keep yourself strictly for your own work, the work that gets somewhere. Very few people have the courage to be decently selfish--not
answer letters--and demand the right to work. If they had their way, these sentimentalists would've had a Newton--yes, or probably a Christ!--
giving up everything they did for the world to address meetings and listen to the troubles of cranky old maids. Nothing takes so much courage as
to keep hard and clear-headed."

And he hadn't even that courage.

When Leora had made complaint, he would be forcibly kind to all sorts of alarmed stray beggars for a day or two, then drift back into his
absorption. There were but two people whose unhappiness could always pierce him: Leora and Gottlieb.

Though he was busier than he had known anyone could ever be, with lipovaccines in the morning, physical chemistry in the evening and, at all
sorts of intense hours between, the continuation of his staphylolysin research, he gave what time he could to seeking out Gottlieb and warming
his vanity by reverent listening.

Then his research wiped out everything else, made him forget Gottlieb and Leora and all his briskness about studying, made him turn his war work
over to others, and confounded night and day in one insane flaming blur as he realized that he had something not unworthy of a Gottlieb,
something at the mysterious source of life.




Chapter 28



Captain Martin Arrowsmith, M.R.C., came home to his good wife Leora, wailing, "I'm so rotten tired, and I feel kind of discouraged. I haven't
accomplished a darn' thing in this whole year at McGurk. Sterile. No good. And I'm hanged if I'll study calculus this evening. Let's go to the
movies. Won't even change to regular human clothes. Too tired."

"All right, honey," said Leora. "But let's have dinner here. I bought a wonderful ole fish this afternoon."

Through the film Martin gave his opinion, as a captain and as a doctor, that it seemed improbable a mother should not know her daughter after an
absence of ten years. He was restless and rational, which is not a mood in which to view the cinema. When they came blinking out of that darkness
lit only from the shadowy screen, he snorted, "I'm going back to the lab. I'll put you in a taxi."

"Oh, let the beastly thing go for one night."

"Now that's unfair! I haven't worked late for three or four nights now!"

"Then take me along."

"Nope. I have a hunch I may be working all night."

Liberty Street, as he raced along it, was sleeping below its towers. It was McGurk's order that the elevator to the Institute should run all
night, and indeed three or four of the twenty staff-members did sometimes use it after respectable hours.

That morning Martin had isolated a new strain of staphylococcus bacteria from the gluteal carbuncle of a patient in the Lower Manhattan Hospital,
a carbuncle which was healing with unusual rapidity. He had placed a bit of the pus in broth and incubated it. In eight hours a good growth of
bacteria had appeared. Before going wearily home he had returned the flask to the incubator.

He was not particularly interested in it, and now, in his laboratory, he removed his military blouse, looked down to the lights on the blue-black
river, smoked a little, thought what a dog he was not to be gentler to Leora, and damned Bert Tozer and Pickerbaugh and Tubbs and anybody else
who was handy to his memory before he absent-mindedly wavered to the incubator, and found that the flask, in which there should have been a
perceptible cloudy growth, had no longer any signs of bacteria--of staphylococci.

"Now what the hell!" he cried. "Why, the broth's as clear as when I seeded it! Now what the-- Think of this fool accident coming up just when I
was going to start something new!"

He hastened from the incubator, in a closet off the corridor, to his laboratory and, holding the flask under a strong light, made certain that he
had seen aright. He fretfully prepared a slide from the flask contents and examined it under the microscope. He discovered nothing but shadows of
what had been bacteria: thin outlines, the form still there but the cell substance gone; minute skeletons on an infinitesimal battlefield.

He raised his head from the microscope, rubbed his tired eyes, reflectively rubbed his neck--his blouse was off, his collar on the floor, his
shirt open at the throat. He considered:

"Something funny here. This culture was growing all right, and now it's committed suicide. Never heard of bugs doing that before. I've hit
something! What caused it? Some chemical change? Something organic?"

Now in Martin Arrowsmith there were no decorative heroisms, no genius for amours, no exotic wit, no edifyingly borne misfortunes. He presented
neither picturesque elegance nor a moral message. He was full of hasty faults and of perverse honesty; a young man often unkindly, often
impolite. But he had one gift: curiosity whereby he saw nothing as ordinary. Had he been an acceptable hero, like Major Rippleton Holabird, he
would have chucked the contents of the flask into the sink, avowed with pretty modesty, "Silly! I've made some error!" and gone his ways. But
Martin, being Martin, walked prosaically up and down his laboratory, snarling. "Now there was some CAUSE for that, and I'm going to find out what
it was."

He did have one romantic notion: he would telephone to Leora and tell her that splendor was happening, and she wasn't to worry about him. He
fumbled down the corridor, lighting matches, trying to find electric switches.

At night all halls are haunted. Even in the smirkingly new McGurk Building there had been a bookkeeper who committed suicide. As Martin groped he
was shakily conscious of feet padding behind him, of shapes which leered from doorways and insolently vanished, of ancient bodiless horrors, and
when he found the switch he rejoiced in the blessing and security of sudden light that re-created the world.

At the Institute telephone switchboard he plugged in wherever it seemed reasonable. Once he thought he was talking to Leora, but it proved to be
a voice, sexless and intolerant, which said "Number pleeeeeze" with a taut alertness impossible to anyone so indolent as Leora. Once it was a
voice which slobbered, "Is this Sarah?" then, "I don't want YOU! Ring off, will yuh!" Once a girl pleaded, "Honestly, Billy, I did try to get
there but the boss came in at five and he said--"

As for the rest it was only a blurring; the sound of seven million people hungry for sleep or love or money.

He observed, "Oh, rats, I guess Lee'll have gone to bed by now," and felt his way back to the laboratory.

A detective, hunting the murderer of bacteria, he stood with his head back, scratching his chin, scratching his memory for like cases of
microorganisms committing suicide or being slain without perceptible cause. He rushed up-stairs to the library, consulted the American and
English authorities and, laboriously, the French and German. He found nothing.

He worried lest there might, somehow, have been no living staphylococci in the pus which he had used for seeding the broth--none there to die. At
a hectic run, not stopping for lights, bumping corners and sliding on the too perfect tile floor, he skidded down the stairs and galloped through
the corridors to his room. He found the remains of the original pus, made a smear on a glass slide, and stained it with gentian-violet, nervously
dribbling out one drop of the gorgeous dye. He sprang to the microscope. As he bent over the brass tube and focused the objective, into the gray-
lavender circular field of vision rose to existence the grape-like clusters of staphylococcus germs, purple dots against the blank plane.

"Staph in it, all right!" he shouted.

Then he forgot Leora, war, night, weariness, success, everything, as he charged into preparations for an experiment, his first great experiment.
He paced furiously, rather dizzy. He shook himself into calmness and settled down at a table, among rings and spirals of cigarette smoke, to list
on small sheets of paper all the possible causes of suicide in the bacteria--all the questions he had to answer and the experiments which should
answer them.

It might be that alkali in an improperly cleaned flask had caused the clearing of the culture. It might be some anti-staph substance existing in
the pus, or something liberated by the staphylococci themselves. It might be some peculiarity of this particular broth.

Each of these had to be tested.

He pried open the door of the glass-storeroom, shattering the lock. He took new flasks, cleaned them, plugged them with cotton, and placed them
in the hot-air oven to sterilize. He found other batches of broth--as a matter of fact he stole them, from Gottlieb's private and highly sacred
supply in the ice-box. He filtered some of the clarified culture through a sterile porcelain filter, and added it to his regular staphylococcus
strains.

And, perhaps most important of all, he discovered that he was out of cigarettes.

Incredulously he slapped each of his pockets, and went the round and slapped them all over again. He looked into his discarded military blouse;
had a cheering idea about having seen cigarettes in a drawer; did not find them; and brazenly marched into the room where hung the aprons and
jackets of the technicians. Furiously he pilfered pockets, and found a dozen beautiful cigarettes in a wrinkled and flattened paper case.

To test each of the four possible causes of the flask's clearing he prepared and seeded with bacteria a series of flasks under varying
conditions, and set them away in the incubator at body temperature. Till the last flask was put away, his hand was steady, his worn face calm. He
was above all nervousness, free from all uncertainty, a professional going about his business.

By this time it was six o'clock of a fine wide August morning, and as he ceased his swift work, as taut nerves slackened, he looked out of his
lofty window and was conscious of the world below: bright roofs, jubilant towers, and a high-decked Sound steamer swaggering up the glossy river.

He was completely fagged; he was, like a surgeon after a battle, like a reporter during an earthquake, perhaps a little insane; but sleepy he was
not. He cursed the delay involved in the growth of the bacteria, without which he could not discover the effect of the various sorts of broths
and bacterial strains, but choked his impatience.

He mounted the noisy slate stairway to the lofty world of the roof. He listened at the door of the Institute's animal house. The guinea pigs,
awake and nibbling, were making a sound like that of a wet cloth rubbed on glass in window-cleaning. He stamped his foot, and in fright they
broke out in their strange sound of fear, like the cooing of doves.

He marched violently up and down, refreshed by the soaring sky, till he was calmed to hunger. Again he went pillaging. He found chocolate
belonging to an innocent technician; he even invaded the office of the Director and in the desk of the Diana-like Pearl Robbins unearthed tea and
a kettle (as well as a lip-stick, and a love-letter beginning "My Little Ickles"). He made himself a profoundly bad cup of tea, then, his whole
body dragging, returned to his table to set down elaborately, in a shabby, nearly-filled note-book, every step of his experiment.

After seven he worked out the operation of the telephone switchboard and called Lower Manhattan Hospital. Could Dr. Arrowsmith have some more pus
from the same carbuncle? What? It'd healed? Curse it! No more of that material.

He hesitated over waiting for Gottlieb's arrival, to tell him of the discovery, but determined to keep silence till he should have determined
whether it was an accident. Eyes wide, too wrought up to sleep in the subway, he fled uptown to tell Leora. He had to tell someone! Waves of
fear, doubt, certainty, and fear again swept over him; his ears rang and his hands trembled.

He rushed up to the flat; he bawled "Lee! Lee!" Before he had unlocked the door. And she was gone.

He gaped. The flat breathed emptiness. He searched it again. She had slept there, she had had a cup of coffee, but she had vanished.

He was at once worried lest there had been an accident, and furious that she should not have been here at the great hour. Sullenly he made
breakfast for himself. . . . It is strange that excellent bacteriologists and chemists should scramble eggs so waterily, should make such bitter
coffee and be so casual about dirty spoons. . . . By the time he had finished the mess he was ready to believe that Leora had left him forever.
He quavered, "I've neglected her a lot." Sluggishly, an old man now, he started for the Institute, and at the entrance to the subway he met her.

She wailed, "I was so worried! I couldn't get you on the 'phone. I went clear down to the Institute to see what'd happened to you."

He kissed her, very competently, and raved, "God, woman, I've got it! The real big stuff! I've found something, not a chemical you put in I mean,
that eats bugs--dissolves 'em--kills 'em. May be a big new step in therapeutics. Oh, no, rats, I don't suppose it really is. Prob'ly just another
of my bulls."

She sought to reassure him but he did not wait. He dashed down to the subway, promising to telephone to her. By ten, he was peering into his
incubator.

There was a cloudy appearance of bacteria in all the flasks except those in which he had used broth from the original alarming flask. In these,
the mysterious murderer of germs had prevented the growth of the new bacteria which he had introduced.

"Great stuff," he said.

He returned the flasks to the incubator, recorded his observations, went again to the library, and searched handbooks, bound proceedings of
societies, periodicals in three languages. He had acquired a reasonable scientific French and German. It is doubtful whether he could have bought
a drink or asked the way to the Kursaal in either language, but he understood the universal Hellenistic scientific jargon, and he pawed through
the heavy books, rubbing his eyes, which were filled with salty fire.

He remembered that he was an army officer and had lipovaccine to make this morning. He went to work, but he was so twitchy that he ruined the
batch, called his patient garcon a fool, and after this injustice sent him out for a pint of whisky.

He had to have a confidant. He telephoned to Leora, lunched with her expensively, and asserted, "It still looks as if there were something to
it." He was back in the Institute every hour that afternoon, glancing at his flasks, but between he tramped the streets, creaking with weariness,
drinking too much coffee.

Every five minutes it came to him, as a quite new and ecstatic idea, "Why don't I go to sleep?" then he remembered, and groaned, "No, I've got to
keep going and watch every step. Can't leave it, or I'll have to begin all over again. But I'm so sleepy! Why don't I go to sleep?"

He dug down, before six, into a new layer of strength, and at six his examination showed that the flasks containing the original broth still had
no growth of bacteria, and the flasks which he had seeded with the original pus had, like the first eccentric flask, after beginning to display a
good growth of bacteria cleared up again under the slowly developing attack of the unknown assassin.

He sat down, drooping with relief. He had it! He stated in the conclusions of his first notes:

"I have observed a principle, which I shall temporarily call the X Principle, in pus from a staphylococcus infection, which checks the growth of
several strains of staphylococcus, and which dissolves the staphylococci from the pus in question."

When he had finished, at seven, his head was on his notebook and he was asleep.

He awoke at ten, went home, ate like a savage, slept again, and was in the laboratory before dawn. His next rest was an hour that afternoon,
sprawled on his laboratory table, with his garcon on guard; the next, a day and a half later, was eight hours in bed, from dawn till noon.

But in dreams he was constantly upsetting a rack of test-tubes or breaking a flask. He discovered an X Principle which dissolved chairs, tables,
human beings. He went about smearing it on Bert Tozers and Dr. Bissexes and fiendishly watching them vanish, but accidentally he dropped it on
Leora and saw her fading, and he woke screaming to find the real Leora's arms about him, while he sobbed, "Oh, I couldn't do anything without
you! Don't ever leave me! I do love you so, even if this damned work does keep me tied up. Stay with me!"

While she sat by him on the frowsy bed, gay in her gingham, he went to sleep, to wake up three hours later and start off for the Institute, his
eyes blood-glaring and set. She was ready for him with strong coffee, waiting on him silently, looking at him proudly, while he waved his arms,
babbling:

"Gottlieb better not talk any more about the importance of new observations! The X Principle may not just apply to staph. Maybe you can sic it on
any bug--cure any germ disease by it. Bug that lives on bugs! Or maybe it's a chemical principle, an enzyme. Oh, I don't know. But I will!"

As he bustled to the Institute he swelled with the certainty that after years of stumbling he had arrived. He had visions of his name in journals
and textbooks; of scientific meetings cheering him. He had been an unknown among the experts of the Institute, and now he pitied all of them. But
when he was back at his bench the grandiose aspirations faded and he was the sniffing, snuffling beagle, the impersonal worker. Before him,
supreme joy of the investigator, new mountain-passes of work opened, and in him was new power.


II


For a week Martin's life had all the regularity of an escaped soldier in the enemy's country, with the same agitation and the same desire to
prowl at night. He was always sterilizing flasks, preparing media of various hydrogen-ion concentrations, copying his old notes into a new book
lovingly labeled "X Principle, Staph," and adding to it further observations. He tried, elaborately, with many flasks and many reseedings, to
determine whether the X Principle would perpetuate itself indefinitely, whether when it was transmitted from tube to new tube of bacteria it
would reappear, whether, growing by cell-division automatically, it was veritably a germ, a sub-germ infecting germs.

During the week Gottlieb occasionally peered over his shoulder, but Martin was unwilling to report until he should have proof, and one good
night's sleep, and perhaps even a shave.

When he was sure that the X Principle did reproduce itself indefinitely, so that in the tenth tube it grew to have as much effect as in the
first, then he solemnly called on Gottlieb and laid before him his results, with his plans for further investigation.

The old man tapped his thin fingers on the report, read it intently, looked up and, not wasting time in congratulations, vomited questions:

Have you done dis? Why have you not done dat? At what temperature is the activity of the Principle at its maximum? Is its activity manifested on
agar-solid medium?

"This is my plan for new work. I think you'll find it includes most of your suggestions."

"Huh!" Gottlieb ran through it and snorted, "Why have you not planned to propagate it on dead staph? That is most important of all."

"Why?"

Gottlieb flew instantly to the heart of the jungle in which Martin had struggled for many days: "Because that will show whether you are dealing
with a living virus."

Martin was humbled, but Gottlieb beamed:

"You haf a big thing. Now do not let the Director know about this and get enthusiastic too soon. I am glad, Martin!"

There was that in his voice which sent Martin swanking down the corridor, back to work--and to not sleeping.

What the X Principle was--chemical or germ--he could not determine, but certainly the original Principle flourished. It could be transmitted
indefinitely; he determined the best temperature for it and found that it did not propagate on dead staphylococcus. When he added a drop
containing the Principle to a growth of staphylococcus which was a gray film on the solid surface of agar, the drop was beautifully outlined by
bare patches, as the enemy made its attack, so that the agar slant looked like moth-eaten beeswax. But within a fortnight one of the knots of
which Gottlieb warned him appeared.

Wary of the hundreds of bacteriologists who would rise to slay him once his paper appeared, he sought to make sure that his results could be
confirmed. At the hospital he obtained pus from many boils, of the arms, the legs, the back; he sought to reduplicate his results--and failed,
complete. No X Principle appeared in any of the new boils, and sadly he went to Gottlieb.

The old man meditated, asked a question or two, sat hunched in his cushioned chair, and demanded:

"What kind of a carbuncle was the original one?"

"Gluteal."

"Ah, den the X Principle may be present in the intestinal contents. Look for it, in people with boils and without."

Martin dashed off. In a week he had obtained the Principle from intestinal contents and from other gluteal boils, finding an especial amount in
boils which were "healing of themselves"; and he transplanted his new Principle, in a heaven of triumph, of admiration for Gottlieb. He extended
his investigation to the intestinal group of organisms and discovered an X Principle against the colon bacillus. At the same time he gave some of
the original Principle to a doctor in the Lower Manhattan Hospital for the treatment of boils, and from him had excited reports of cures, more
excited inquiries as to what this mystery might be.

With these new victories he went parading in to Gottlieb, and suddenly he was being trounced:

"Oh! So! Beautiful! You let a doctor try it before you finished your research? You want fake reports of cures to get into the newspapers, to be
telegraphed about places, and have everybody in the world that has a pimple come tumbling in to be cured, so you will never be able to work? You
want to be a miracle man, and not a scientist? You do not want to complete things? You wander off monkey-skipping and flap-doodling with colon
bacillus before you have finish with staph--before you haf really begun your work--before you have found what is the NATURE of the X Principle?
Get out of my office! You are a--a--a college president! Next I know you will be dining with Tubbs, and get your picture in the papers for a
smart cure-vendor!"

Martin crept out, and when he met Billy Smith in the corridor and the little chemist twittered, "Up to something big? Haven't seen you lately,"
Martin answered in the tone of Doc Vickerson's assistant in Elk Mills:

"Oh--no--gee--I'm just grubbing along, I guess."


III


As sharply and quite as impersonally as he would have watched the crawling illness of an infected guinea pig, Martin watched himself, in the
madness of overwork, drift toward neurasthenia. With considerable interest he looked up the symptoms of neurasthenia, saw one after another of
them twitch at him, and casually took the risk.

From an irritability which made him a thoroughly impossible person to live with, he passed into a sick nervousness in which he missed things for
which he reached, dropped test-tubes, gasped at sudden footsteps behind him. Dr. Yeo's croaking voice became to him a fever, an insult, and he
waited with his whole body clenched, muttering, "Shut up--shut up--oh, shut UP!" when Yeo stopped to talk to someone outside his door.

Then he was obsessed by the desire to spell backward all the words which snatched at him from signs.

As he stood dragging out his shoulder on a subway strap, he pored over the posters, seeking new words to spell backward. Some of them were
remarkably agreeable: No Smoking became a jaunty and agreeable "gnikoms on," and Broadway was tolerable as "yawdaorb," but he was displeased by
his attempts on Punch, Health, Rough; while Strength, turning into "htgnerts" was abominable.

When he had to return to his laboratory three times before he was satisfied that he had closed the window, he sat down, coldly, informed himself
that he was on the edge, and took council as to whether he dared go on. It was not very good council: he was so glorified by his unfolding work
that his self could not be taken seriously.

At last Fear closed in on him.

It began with childhood's terror of the darkness. He lay awake dreading burglars; footsteps in the hall were a creeping cutthroat; an unexplained
scratching on the fire-escape was a murderer with an automatic in his fist. He beheld it so clearly that he had to spring from bed and look
timorously out, and when in the street below he did actually see a man standing still, he was cold with panic.

Every sky glow was a fire. He was going to be trapped in his bed, be smothered, die writhing.

He knew absolutely that his fears were absurd, and that knowledge did not at all keep them from dominating him.

He was ashamed at first to acknowledge his seeming cowardice to Leora. Admit that he was crouching like a child? But when he had lain rigid,
almost screaming, feeling the cord of an assassin squeezing his throat, till the safe dawn, brought back a dependable world, he muttered of
"insomnia" and after that, night on night, he crept into her arms and she shielded him from the horrors, protected him from garroters, kept away
the fire.

He made a checking list of the favorite neurasthenic fears: agoraphobia, claustrophobia, pyrophobia, anthropophobia, and the rest, ending with
what he asserted to be "the most fool, pretentious, witch-doctor term of the whole bloomin' lot," namely, siderodromophobia, the fear of a
railway journey. The first night, he was able to check against pyrophobia, for at the vaudeville with Leora, when on the stage a dancer lighted a
brazier, he sat waiting for the theater to take fire. He looked cautiously along the row of seats (raging at himself the while for doing it), he
estimated his chance of reaching an exit, and became easy only when he had escaped into the street.

It was when anthropophobia set in, when he was made uneasy by people who walked too close to him, that, sagely viewing his list and seeing how
many phobias were now checked, he permitted himself to rest.

He fled to the Vermont hills for a four-day tramp--alone, that he might pound on the faster. He went at night, by sleeper, and was able to make
the most interesting observations of siderodromophobia.

He lay in a lower berth, the little pillow wadded into a lump. He was annoyed by the waving of his clothes as they trailed from the hanger beside
him, at the opening of the green curtains. The window-shade was up six inches; it left a milky blur across which streaked yellow lights, emphatic
in the noisy darkness of his little cell. He was shivering with anxiety. Whenever he tried to relax, he was ironed back into apprehension. When
the train stopped between stations and from the engine came a questioning, fretful whistle, he was aghast with certainty that something had gone
wrong--a bridge was out, a train was ahead of them; perhaps another was coming just behind them, about to smash into them at sixty miles an hour-
-

He imagined being wrecked, and he suffered more than from the actual occurrence, for he pictured not one wreck but half a dozen, with assorted
miseries. . . . The flat wheel just beneath him--surely it shouldn't pound like that--why hadn't the confounded man with the hammer detected it
at the last big station?--the flat wheel cracking; the car lurching, falling, being dragged on its side. . . . A collision, a crash, the car
instantly a crumpled, horrible heap, himself pinned in the telescoped berth, caught between seat and seat. Shrieks, death groans, the creeping
flames. . . . The car turning, falling plumping into a river on its side; himself trying to crawl through a window as the water seeped about his
body. . . . Himself standing by the wrenched car, deciding whether to keep away and protect his sacred work or go back, rescue people, and be
killed.

So real were the visions that he could not endure lying here, waiting. He reached for the berth light, and could not find the button. In
agitation he tore a match-box from his coat pocket, scratched a match, snapped on the light. He saw himself, under the sheets, reflected in the
polished wooden ceiling of his berth like a corpse in a coffin. Hastily he crawled out, with trousers and coat over his undergarments (he had
somehow feared to show so much trust in the train as to put on pajamas), and with bare disgusted feet he paddled up to the smoking compartment.
The porter was squatting on a stool, polishing an amazing pile of shoes.

Martin longed for his encouraging companionship, and ventured, "Warm night."

"Uh-huh," said the porter.

Martin curled on the chill leather seat of the smoking compartment, profoundly studying a brass wash-bowl. He was conscious that the porter was
disapproving, but he had comfort in calculating that the man must make this run thrice a week, tens of thousands of miles yearly, apparently
without being killed, and there might be a chance of their lasting till morning.

He smoked till his tongue was raw and till, fortified by the calmness of the porter, he laughed at the imaginary catastrophes. He staggered
sleepily to his berth.

Instantly he was tense again, and he lay awake till dawn.

For four days he tramped, swam in cold brooks, slept under trees or in straw stacks, and came back (but by day) with enough reserve of energy to
support him till his experiment should have turned from overwhelming glory into sane and entertaining routine.




Chapter 29



When the work on the X Principle had gone on for six weeks, the Institute staff suspected that something was occurring, and they hinted to Martin
that he needed their several assistances. He avoided them. He did not desire to be caught in any of the log-rolling factions, though for Terry
Wickett, still in France, and for Terry's rough compulsion to honesty he was sometimes lonely.

How the Director first heard that Martin was finding gold is not known.

Dr. Tubbs was tired of being a Colonel--there were too many Generals in New York--and for two weeks he had not had an Idea which would
revolutionize even a small part of the world. One morning he burst in, whiskers alive, and reproached Martin:

"What is this mysterious discovery you're making, Arrowsmith? I've asked Dr. Gottlieb, but he evades me; he says you want to be sure, first. I
must know about it, not only because I take a very friendly interest in your work but because I am, after all, your Director!"

Martin felt that his one ewe lamb was being snatched from him but he could see no way to refuse. He brought out his note-books and the agar
slants with their dissolved patches of bacilli. Tubbs gasped, assaulted his whiskers, did a moment of impressive thinking, and clamored:

"Do you mean to say you think you've discovered an infectious disease of bacteria, and you haven't told me about it? My dear boy, I don't believe
you quite realize that you may have hit on the supreme way to kill pathogenic bacteria. . . . And you didn't tell me!"

"Well, sir, I wanted to make certain--"

"I admire your caution, but you must understand, Martin, that the basic aim of this Institution is the conquest of disease, not making pretty
scientific notes! You MAY have hit on one of the discoveries of a generation; the sort of thing that Mr. McGurk and I are looking for. . . . If
your results are confirmed. . . . I shall ask Dr. Gottlieb's opinion."

He shook Martin's hand five or six times and bustled out. Next day he called Martin to his office, shook his hand some more, told Pearl Robbins
that they were honored to know him, then led him to a mountain top and showed him all the kingdoms of the world:

"Martin, I have some plans for you. You have been working brilliantly, but without a complete vision of broader humanity. Now the Institute is
organized on the most flexible lines. There are no set departments, but only units formed about exceptional men like our good friend Gottlieb. If
any new man has the real right thing, we'll provide him with every facility, instead of letting him merely plug along doing individual work. I
have given your results the most careful consideration, Martin; I have talked them over with Dr. Gottlieb--though I must say he does not
altogether share my enthusiasm about immediate practical results. And I have decided to submit to the Board of Trustees a plan for a Department
of Microbic Pathology, with you as head! You will have an assistant--a real trained Ph.D.--and more room and technicians, and you will report to
me directly, talk things over with me daily, instead of with Gottlieb. You will be relieved of all war work, by my order--though you can retain
your uniform and everything. And your salary will be, I should think, if Mr. McGurk and the other Trustees confirm me, ten thousand a year
instead of five.

"Yes, the best room for you would be that big one on the upper floor, to the right of the elevators. That's vacant now. And your office across
the hall.

"And all the assistance you require. Why, my boy, you won't need to sit up nights using your hands in this wasteful way, but just think things
out and take up possible extensions of the work-cover all the possible fields. We'll extend this to everything! We'll have scores of physicians
in hospitals helping us and confirming our results and widening our efforts. . . . We might have a weekly council of all these doctors and
assistants, with you and me jointly presiding. . . . If men like Koch and Pasteur had only had such a system, how much more SCOPE their work
might have had! Efficient universal CO-OPERATION--that's the thing in science today--the time of this silly, jealous, fumbling individual
research has gone by.

"My boy, we may have found the real thing--another salvarsan! We'll publish together! We'll have the whole world talking! Why, I lay awake last
night thinking of our magnificent opportunity! In a few months we may be curing not only staph infections but typhoid, dysentery! Martin, as your
colleague, I do not for a moment wish to detract from the great credit which is yours, but I must say that if you had been more closely allied
with Me you would have extended your work to practical proofs and results long before this."

Martin wavered back to his room, dazzled by the view of a department of his own, assistants, a cheering world--and ten thousand a year. But his
work seemed to have been taken from him, his own self had been taken from him; he was no longer to be Martin, and Gottlieb's disciple, but a Man
of Measured Merriment, Dr. Arrowsmith, Head of the Department of Microbic Pathology, who would wear severe collars and make addresses and never
curse.

Doubts enfeebled him. Perhaps the X Principle would develop only in the test-tube; perhaps it had no large value for human healing. He wanted to
know--to KNOW.

Then Rippleton Holabird burst in on him:

"Martin, my dear boy, the Director has just been telling me about your discovery and his splendid plans for you. I want to congratulate you with
all my heart, and to welcome you as a fellow department-head--and you so young--only thirty-four, isn't it? What a magnificent future! Think,
Martin"--Major Holabird discarded his dignity, sat astride a chair--"think of all you have ahead! If this work really pans out, there's no limit
to the honors that'll come to you, you lucky young dog! Acclaim by scientific societies, any professorship you might happen to want, prizes, the
biggest men begging to consult you, a ripping place in society!

"Now listen, old boy: Perhaps you know how close I am to Dr. Tubbs, and I see no reason why you shouldn't come in with us, and we three run
things here to suit ourselves. Wasn't it simply too decent of the Director to be so eager to recognize and help you in every way! So cordial--and
so helpful. Now you really understand him. And the three of us-- Some day we might be able to erect a superstructure of co-operative science
which would control not only McGurk but every institute and every university scientific department in the country, and so produce really
efficient research. When Dr. Tubbs retires, I have--I'm speaking with the most complete confidence--I have some reason to suppose that the Board
of Trustees will consider me as his successor. Then, old boy, if this work succeeds, you and I can do things together!

"To be ever so frank, there are very few men in our world (think of poor old Yeo!) who combine presentable personalities with first-rate
achievement, and if you'll just get over some of your abruptness and your unwillingness to appreciate big executives and charming women (because,
thank God, you do wear your clothes well--when you take the trouble!) why, you and I can become the dictators of science throughout the whole
country!"

Martin did not think of an answer till Holabird had gone.

He perceived the horror of the shrieking bawdy thing called Success, with its demand that he give up quiet work and parade forth to be pawed by
every blind devotee and mud-spattered by every blind enemy.

He fled to Gottlieb as to the wise and tender father, and begged to be saved from Success and Holabirds and A. DeWitt Tubbses and their hordes of
address-making scientists, degree-hunting authors, pulpit orators, popular surgeons, valeted journalists, sentimental merchant princes, literary
politicians, titled sportsmen, statesmenlike generals, interviewed senators, sententious bishops.

Gottlieb was worried:

"I knew Tubbs was up to something idealistic and nasty when he came purring to me, but I did not t'ink he would try to turn you into a megaphone
all so soon in one day! I will gird up my loins and go oud to battle with the forces of publicity!"

He was defeated.

"I have let you alone, Dr. Gottlieb," said Tubbs, "but, hang it, I am the Director! And I must say that, perhaps owing to my signal stupidity, I
fail to see the horrors of enabling Arrowsmith to cure thousands of suffering persons and to become a man of weight and esteem!"

Gottlieb took it to Ross McGurk.

"Max, I love you like a brother, but Tubbs is the Director, and if he feels he needs this Arrowsmith (Is he the thin young fellow I see around
your lab?) then I have no right to stop him. I've got to back him up the same as I would the master of one of our ships," said McGurk.

Not till the Board of Trustees, which consisted of McGurk himself, the president of the University of Wilmington, and three professors of science
in various universities, should meet and give approval, would Martin be a department-head. Meantime Tubbs demanded:

"Now, Martin, you must hasten and publish your results. Get right to it. In fact you should have done it before this. Throw your material
together as rapidly as possible and send a note in to the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine, to be published in their next
proceedings."

"But I'm not ready to publish! I want to have every loophole plugged up before I announce anything whatever!"

"Nonsense! That attitude is old-fashioned. This is no longer an age of parochialism but of competition, in art and science just as much as in
commerce--co-operation with your own group, but with those outside it, competition to the death! Plug up the holes thoroughly, later, but we
can't have somebody else stealing a march on us. Remember you have your name to make. The way to make it is by working with me--toward the
greatest good for the greatest number."

As Martin began his paper, thinking of resigning but giving it up because Tubbs seemed to him at least better than the Pickerbaughs, he had a
vision of a world of little scientists, each busy in a roofless cell. Perched on a cloud, watching them, was the divine Tubbs, a glory of
whiskers, ready to blast any of the little men who stopped being earnest and wasted time on speculation about anything which he had not assigned
to them. Back of their welter of coops, unseen by the tutelary Tubbs, the lean giant figure of Gottlieb stood sardonic on a stormy horizon.

Literary expression was not easy to Martin. He delayed with his paper, while Tubbs became irritable and whipped him on. The experiments had
ceased; there were misery and pen-scratching and much tearing of manuscript paper in Martin's particular roofless cell.

For once he had no refuge in Leora. She cried:

"Why not? Ten thousand a year would be awfully nice, Sandy. Gee! We've always been so poor, and you do like nice flats and things. And to boss
your own department-- And you could consult Dr. Gottlieb just the same. He's a department-head, isn't he, and yet he keeps independent of Dr.
Tubbs. Oh, I'm for it!"

And slowly, under the considerable increase in respect given to him at Institute lunches, Martin himself was "for it."

"We could get one of those new apartments on Park Avenue. Don't suppose they cost more than three thousand a year," he meditated. "Wouldn't be so
bad to be able to entertain people there. Not that I'd let it interfere with my work. . . . Kind of nice."

It was still more kind of nice, however agonizing in the taking, to be recognized socially.

Capitola McGurk, who hitherto had not perceived him except as an object less interesting than Gladys the Centrifuge, telephoned: ". . . Dr. Tubbs
so enthusiastic and Ross and I are so pleased. Be delighted if Mrs. Arrowsmith and you could dine with us next Thursday at eight-thirty."

Martin accepted the royal command.

It was his conviction that after glimpses of Angus Duer and Rippleton Holabird he had seen luxury, and understood smart dinner parties. Leora and
he went without too much agitation to the house of Ross McGurk, in the East Seventies, near Fifth Avenue. The house did, from the street, seem to
have an unusual quantity of graystone gargoyles and carven lintels and bronze grills, but it did not seem large.

Inside, the vaulted stone hallway opened up like a cathedral. They were embarrassed by the footmen, awed by the automatic elevator, oppressed by
a hallway full of vellum folios and Italian chests and a drawing-room full of water-colors, and reduced to rusticity by Capitola's queenly white
satin and pearls.

There were eight or ten Persons of Importance, male and female, looking insignificant but bearing names as familiar as Ivory Soap.

Did one give his arm to some unknown lady and "take her in," Martin wondered. He rejoiced to find that one merely straggled into the dining-room
under McGurk's amiable basso herding.

The dining-room was gorgeous and very hideous, in stamped leather and hysterias of gold, with collections of servants watching one's use of
asparagus forks. Martin was seated (it is doubtful if he ever knew that he was the guest of honor) between Capitola McGurk and a woman of whom he
could learn only that she was the sister of a countess.

Capitola leaned toward him in her great white splendor.

"Now, Dr. Arrowsmith, just what is this you are discovering?"

"Why, it's--uh--I'm trying to figure--"

"Dr. Tubbs tells us that you have found such wonderful new ways of controlling disease." Her L's were a melody of summer rivers, her R's the
trill of birds in the brake. "Oh, what--WHAT could be more beau-tiful than relieving this sad old world of its burden of illness! But just
precisely what IS it that you're doing?"

"Why, it's awfully early to be sure but-- You see, it's like this. You take certain bugs like staph--"

"Oh, how interesting science is, but how frightfully difficult for simple people like me to grasp! But we're all so humble. We're just waiting
for scientists like you to make the world secure for friendship--"

Then Capitola gave all her attention to her other man. Martin looked straight ahead and ate and suffered. The sister of the countess, a sallow
and stringy woman, was glowing at him. He turned with unhappy meekness (noting that she had one more fork than he, and wondering where he had got
lost).

She blared, "You are a scientist, I am told."

"Ye-es."

"The trouble with scientists is that they do not understand beauty. They are so cold."

Rippleton Holabird would have made pretty mirth, but Martin could only quaver, "No, I don't think that's true," and consider whether he dared
drink another glass of champagne.

When they had been herded back to the drawing-room, after masculine but achingly elaborate passings of the port, Capitola swooped on him with
white devouring wings:

"Dear Dr. Arrowsmith, I really didn't get a chance at dinner to ask you just exactly WHAT you are doing. . . . Oh! Have you seen my dear little
children at the Charles Street settlement? I'm sure ever so many of them will become the most fascinating scientists. You must come lecture to
them."

That night he fretted to Leora, "Going to be hard to keep up this twittering. But I suppose I've got to learn to enjoy it. Oh, well, think how
nice it'll be to give some dinners of our own, with real people, Gottlieb and everybody, when I'm a department-head."

Next morning Gottlieb came slowly into Martin's room. He stood by the window; he seemed to be avoiding Martin's eyes. He sighed, "Something sort
of bad--perhaps not altogether bad--has happened."

"What is it, sir? Anything I can do?"

"It does not apply to me. To you."

Irritably Martin thought, "Is he going into all this danger-of-rapid-success stuff again? I'm getting tired of it!"

Gottlieb ambled toward him. "It iss a pity, Martin, but you are not the discoverer of the X Principle."

"Wh-what--"

"Someone else has done it."

"They have not! I've searched all the literature, and except for Twort, not one person has even hinted at anticipating-- Why, good Lord, Dr.
Gottlieb, it would mean that all I've done, all these weeks, has just been waste, and I'm a fool--"

"Vell. Anyvay. D'Herelle of the Pasteur Institute has just now published in the Comptes Rendus, Academie des Sciences, a report--it is your X
Principle, absolute. Only he calls it 'bacteriophage.' So."

"Then I'm--"

In his mind Martin finished it, "Then I'm not going to be a department-head or famous or anything else. I'm back in the gutter." All strength
went out of him and all purpose, and the light of creation faded to dirty gray.

"Now of course," said Gottlieb, "you could claim to be co-discoverer and spend the rest of your life fighting to get recognized. Or you could
forget it, and write a nice letter congratulating D'Herelle, and go back to work."

Martin mourned, "Oh, I'll go back to work. Nothing else to do. I guess Tubbs'll chuck the new department now. I'll have time to really finish my
research--maybe I've got some points that D'Herelle hasn't hit on--and I'll publish it to corroborate him. . . . Damn him! . . . Where is his
report? . . . I suppose you're glad that I'm saved from being a Holabird."

"I ought to be. It is a sin against my religion that I am not. But I am getting old. And you are my friend. I am sorry you are not to have the
fun of being pretentious and successful--for a while. . . . Martin, it iss nice that you will corroborate D'Herelle. That is science: to work and
not to care--too much--if somebody else gets the credit. . . . Shall I tell Tubbs about D'Herelle's priority, or will you?"

Gottlieb straggled away, looking back a little sadly.

Tubbs came in to wail, "If you had only published earlier, as I told you, Dr. Arrowsmith! You have really put me in a most embarrassing position
before the Board of Trustees. Of course there can be no question now of a new department."

"Yes," said Martin vacantly.

He carefully filed away the beginnings of his paper and turned to his bench. He stared at a shining flask till it fascinated him like a crystal
ball. He pondered:

"Wouldn't have been so bad if Tubbs had let me alone. Damn these old men, damn these Men of Measured Merriment, these Important Men that come and
offer you honors. Money. Decorations. Titles. Want to make you windy with authority. Honors! If you get 'em, you become pompous, and then when
you're used to 'em, if you lose 'em you feel foolish.

"So I'm not going to be rich. Leora, poor kid, she won't have her new dresses and flat and everything. We-- Won't be so much fun in the lil old
flat, now. Oh, quit whining!

"I wish Terry were here.

"I love that man Gottlieb. He might have gloated--

"Bacteriophage, the Frenchman calls it. Too long. Better just call it PHAGE. Even got to take his name for it, for my own X Principle! Well, I
had a lot of fun, working all those nights. Working--"

He was coming out of his trance. He imagined the flask filled with staph-clouded broth. He plodded into Gottlieb's office to secure the journal
containing D'Herelle's report, and read it minutely, enthusiastically.

"There's a man, there's a scientist!" he chuckled.

On his way home he was planning to experiment on the Shiga dysentery bacillus with phage (as henceforth he called the X Principle), planning to
volley questions and criticisms at D'Herelle, hoping that Tubbs would not discharge him for a while, and expanding with relief that he would not
have to do his absurd premature paper on phage, that he could be lewd and soft-collared and easy, not judicious and spied-on and weighty.

He grinned, "Gosh, I'll bet Tubbs was disappointed! He'd figured on signing all my papers with me and getting the credit. Now for this Shiga
experiment-- Poor Lee, she'll have to get used to my working nights, I guess."

Leora kept to herself what she felt about it--or at least most of what she felt.




Chapter 30



For a year broken only by Terry Wickett's return after the Armistice, and by the mockeries of that rowdy intelligence, Martin was in a grind of
drudgery. Week on week he toiled at complicated phage experiments. His work--his hands, his technique--became more adept, and his days more
steady, less fretful.

He returned to his evening studying. He went from mathematics into physical chemistry; began to understand the mass action law; became as
sarcastic as Terry about what he called the "bedside manner" of Tubbs and Holabird; read much French and German; went canoeing on the Hudson on
Sunday afternoons; and had a bawdy party with Leora and Terry to celebrate the day when the Institute was purified by the sale of Holabird's
pride, Gladys the Centrifuge.

He suspected that Dr. Tubbs, now magnificent with the ribbon of the Legion of Honor, had retained him in the Institute only because of Gottlieb's
intervention. But it may be that Tubbs and Holabird hoped he would again blunder into publicity-bringing miracles, for they were both polite to
him at lunch--polite and wistfully rebuking, and full of meaty remarks about publishing one's discoveries early instead of dawdling.

It was more than a year after Martin's anticipation by D'Herelle when Tubbs appeared in the laboratory with suggestions:

"I've been thinking, Arrowsmith," said Tubbs.

He looked it.

"D'Herelle's discovery hasn't aroused the popular interest I thought it would. If he'd only been here with us, I'd have seen to it that he got
the proper attention. Practically no newspaper comment at all. Perhaps we can still do something. As I understand it, you've been going along
with what Dr. Gottlieb would call 'fundamental research.' I think it may now be time for you to use phage in practical healing. I want you to
experiment with phage in pneumonia, plague, perhaps typhoid, and when your experiments get going, make some practical tests in collaboration with
the hospitals. Enough of all this mere frittering and vanity. Let's really CURE somebody!"

Martin was not free from a fear of dismissal if he refused to obey. And he was touched as Tubbs went on:

"Arrowsmith, I suspect you sometimes feel I lack a sense of scientific precision when I insist on practical results. I--Somehow I don't see the
really noble and transforming results coming out of this Institute that we ought to be getting, with our facilities. I'd like to do something
big, my boy, something fine for poor humanity, before I pass on. Can't you give it to me? Go cure the plague!"

For once Tubbs was a tired smile and not an earnestness of whiskers.

That day, concealing from Gottlieb his abandonment of the quest for the fundamental nature of phage, Martin set about fighting pneumonia, before
attacking the Black Death. And when Gottiieb learned of it, he was absorbed in certain troubles of his own.

Martin cured rabbits of pleuro-pneumonia by the injection of phage, and by feeding them with it he prevented the spread of pneumonia. He found
that phage-produced immunity could be as infectious as a disease.

He was pleased with himself, and expected pleasure from Tubbs, but for weeks Tubbs did not heed him. He was off on a new enthusiasm, the most
virulent of his whole life: he was organizing the League of Cultural Agencies.

He was going to standardize and co-ordinate all mental activities in America, by the creation of a bureau which should direct and pat and gently
rebuke and generally encourage chemistry and batik-making, poetry and Arctic exploration, animal husbandry and Bible study, Negro spirituals and
business-letter writing. He was suddenly in conference with conductors of symphony orchestras, directors of art-schools, owners of itinerant
Chautauquas, liberal governors, ex-clergymen who wrote tasty philosophy for newspaper syndicates, in fact all the proprietors of American
intellectuality--particularly including a millionaire named Minnigen who had recently been elevating the artistic standards of the motion
pictures.

Tubbs was all over the Institute inviting the researchers to join him in the League of Cultural Agencies with its fascinating committee-meetings
and dinners. Most of them grunted, "The Old Man is erupting again," and forgot him, but one ex-major went out every evening to confer with
serious ladies who wore distinguished frocks, who sobbed over "the loss of spiritual and intellectual horse-power through lack of co-ordination,"
and who went home in limousines.

There were rumors. Dr. Billy Smith whispered that he had gone in to see Tubbs and heard McGurk shouting at him, "Your job is to run this shop and
not work for that land-stealing, four-flushing, play-producing son of evil, Pete Minnigen!"

The morning after, when Martin ambled to his laboratory, he discovered a gasping, a muttering, a shaking in the corridors, and incredulously he
heard:

"Tubbs has resigned!"

"No!"

"They say he's gone to his League of Cultural Agencies. This fellow Minnigen has given the League a scad of money, and Tubbs is to get twice the
salary he had here!"


II


Instantly, for all but the zealots like Gottlieb, Terry, Martin, and the bio-physics assistant, research was halted. There was a surging of
factions, a benevolent and winning buzz of scientists who desired to be the new Director of the Institute.

Rippleton Holabird, Yeo the carpenter-like biologist, Gillingham the joky chief in bio-physics, Aaron Sholtheis the neat Russian Jewish High
Church Episcopalian, all of them went about with expressions of modest willingness. They were affectionate with everybody they met in the
corridors, however violent they were in private discussions. Added to them were no few outsiders, professors and researchers in other institutes,
who found it necessary to come and confer about rather undefined matters with Ross McGurk.

Terry remarked to Martin, "Probably Pearl Robbins and your garcon are pitching horseshoes for the Directorship. My garcon ain't--the only reason,
though, is because I've just murdered him. At that, I think Pearl would be the best choice. She's been Tubbs's secretary so long that she's
learned all his ignorance about scientific technique."

Rippleton Holabird was the most unctuous of the office seekers, and the most hungry. The war over, he missed his uniform and his authority. He
urged Martin:

"You know how I've always believed in your genius, Martin, and I know how dear old Gottlieb believes in you. If you would get Gottlieb to back
me, to talk to McGurk-- Of course in taking the Directorship I would be making a sacrifice, because I'd have to give up my research, but I'd be
willing because I feel, really, that somebody with a Tradition ought to carry on the control. Tubbs is backing me, and if Gottlieb did--I'd see
that it was to Gottlieb's advantage. I'd give him a lot more floor-space!"

Through the Institute it was vaguely known that Capitola was advocating the election of Holabird as "the only scientist here who is also a
gentleman." She was seen sailing down corridors, a frigate, with Holabird a sloop in her wake.

But while Holabird beamed, Nicholas Yeo looked secret and satisfied.

The whole Institute fluttered on the afternoon when the Board of Trustees met in the Hall, for the election of a Director. They were turned from
investigators into boarding-school girls. The Board debated, or did something annoying, for draining hours.

At four, Terry Wickett hastened to Martin with, "Say, Slim, I've got a straight tip that They've elected Silva, dean of the Winnemac medical
school. That's your shop, isn't it? Wha's like?"

"He's a fine old-- No! He and Gottlieb hate each other. Lord! Gottlieb'll resign, and I'll have to get out. Just when my work's going nice!"

At five, past doors made of attentive eyes, the Board of Trustees marched to the laboratory of Max Gottlieb.

Holabird was heard saying bravely, "Of course with me, I wouldn't give my research up for any administrative job." And Pearl Robbins informed
Terry, "Yes, it's true--Mr. McGurk himself just told me--the Board has elected Dr. Gottlieb the new Director."

"Then they're fools," said Terry. "He'll refuse it, with wilence. 'Dot dey should ask me to go monkey-skipping mit committee meetings!' Fat
chance!"

When the Board had gone, Martin and Terry flooded into Gottlieb's laboratory and found the old man standing by his bench, more erect than they
had seen him for years.

"Is it true--they want you to be Director?" panted Martin.

"Yes, they have asked me."

"But you'll refuse? You won't let 'em gum up your work!"

"Vell. . . . I said my real work must go on. They consent I should appoint an Assistant Director to do the detail. You see--Of course nothing
must interfere with my immunology, but dis gives me the chance to do big t'ings and make a free scientific institute for all you boys. And those
fools at Winnemac that laughed at my idea of a real medical school, now maybe they will see-- Do you know who was my rival for Director--do you
know who it was, Martin? It was that man Silva! Ha!"

In the corridor Terry groaned, "Requiescat in pace."


III


To the dinner in Gottlieb's honor (the only dinner that ever was given in Gottlieb's honor) there came not only the men of impressive but easy
affairs who attend all dinners of honor, but the few scientists whom Gottlieb admired.

He appeared late, rather shaky, escorted by Martin. When he reached the speakers' table, the guests rose to him, shouting. He peered at them, he
tried to speak, he held out his long arms as if to take them all in, and sank down sobbing.

There were cables from Europe; ardent letters from Tubbs and Dean Silva bewailing their inability to be present; telegrams from college
presidents; and all of these were read to admiring applause.

But Capitola murmured, "Just the same, we shall miss dear Dr. Tubbs. He was so forward-looking. Don't play with your fork, Ross."

So Max Gottlieb took charge of the McGurk Institute of Biology, and in a month that Institute became a shambles.


IV


Gottlieb planned to give only an hour a day to business. As Assistant Director he appointed Dr. Aaron Sholtheis, the epidemiologist, the Yonkers
churchman and dahlia-fancier. Gottlieb explained to Martin that, though of course Sholtheis was a fool, yet he was the only man in sight who
combined at least a little scientific ability with a willingness to endure the routine and pomposity and compromises of executive work.

By continuing his ancient sneers at all bustling managers, Gottlieb obviously felt that he excused himself for having become a manager.

He could not confine his official work to an hour a day. There were too many conferences, too many distinguished callers, too many papers which
needed his signature. He was dragged into dinner-parties; and the long, vague, palavering luncheons to which a Director has to go, and the
telephoning to straighten out the dates of these tortures, took nervous hours. Each day his executive duties crawled into two hours or three or
four, and he raged, he became muddled by complications of personnel and economy, he was ever more autocratic, more testy; and the loving
colleagues of the Institute, who had been soothed or bullied into surface peace by Tubbs, now jangled openly.

While he was supposed to radiate benevolence from the office recently occupied by Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs, Gottlieb clung to his own laboratory and
to his narrow office as a cat clings to its cushion under a table. Once or twice he tried to sit and look impressive in the office of the
Director, but fled from that large clean vacuity and from Miss Robbins's snapping typewriter to his own den that smelled not of forward-looking
virtue but only of cigarettes and old papers.

To McGurk, as to every scientific institution, came hundreds of farmers and practical nurses and suburban butchers who had paid large fares from
Oklahoma or Oregon to get recognition for the unquestionable cures which they had discovered: oil of Mississippi catfish which saved every case
of tuberculosis, arsenic pastes guaranteed to cure all cancers. They came with letters and photographs amid the frayed clean linen in their
shabby suit-cases--at any opportunity they would stoop over their bags and hopefully bring out testimonials from their Pastors; they begged for a
chance to heal humanity, and for themselves only enough money to send The Girl to musical conservatory. So certain, so black-crapely beseeching
were they that no reception-clerk could be trained to keep them all out.

Gottlieb found them seeping into his office. He was sorry for them. They did take his working hours, they did scratch his belief that he was
hard-hearted, but they implored him with such wretched timorousness that he could not get rid of them without making promises, and admitting
afterward that to have been more cruel would have been less cruel.

It was the Important People to whom he was rude.

The Directorship devoured enough time and peace to prevent Gottlieb from going on with the ever more recondite problems of his inquiry into the
nature of specificity, and his inquiry prevented him from giving enough attention to the Institute to keep it from falling to pieces. He depended
on Sholtheis, passed decisions on to him, but Sholtheis, since in any case Gottlieb would get all the credit for a successful Directorship, kept
up his own scientific work and passed the decisions to Miss Pearl Robbins, so that the actual Director was the handsome and jealous Pearl.

There was no craftier or crookeder Director in the habitable world. Pearl enjoyed it. She so warmly and modestly assured Ross McGurk of the
merits of Gottlieb and of her timorous devotion to him, she so purred to the flattery of Rippleton Holabird, she so blandly answered the hoarse
hostility of Terry Wickett by keeping him from getting materials for his work, that the Institute reeled with intrigue.

Yeo was not speaking to Sholtheis. Terry threatened Holabird to "paste him one." Gottlieb constantly asked Martin for advice, and never took it.
Joust, the vulgar but competent bio-physicist, lacking the affection which kept Martin and Terry from reproaching the old man, told Gottlieb that
he was a "rotten Director and ought to quit," and was straightway discharged and replaced by a muffin.

Max Gottlieb had ever discoursed to Martin of "the jests of the gods." Among these jests Martin had never beheld one so pungent as this whereby
the pretentiousness and fussy unimaginativeness which he had detested in Tubbs should have made him a good manager, while the genius of Gottlieb
should have made him a feeble tyrant; the jest that the one thing worse than a too managed and standardized institution should be one that was
not managed and standardized at all. He would once have denied it with violence, but nightly now he prayed for Tubbs's return.

If the business of the Institute was not more complicated thereby, certainly its placidity was the more disturbed by the appearance of Gustaf
Sondelius, who had just returned from a study of sleeping sickness in Africa and who noisily took one of the guest laboratories.

Gustaf Sondelius, the soldier of preventive medicine whose lecture had sent Martin from Wheatsylvania to Nautilus, had remained in his gallery of
heroes as possessing a little of Gottlieb's perception, something of Dad Silva's steady kindliness, something of Terry's tough honesty though
none of his scorn of amenities, and with these a spicy, dripping richness altogether his own. It is true that Sondelius did not remember Martin.
Since their evening in Minneapolis he had drunk and debated and flamboyantly ridden to obscure but vinuous destinations with too many people. But
he was made to remember, and in a week Sondelius and Terry and Martin were to be seen tramping and dining, or full of topics and gin at Martin's
flat.

Sondelius's wild flaxen hair was almost gray, but he had the same bull shoulders, the same wide brow, and the same tornado of plans to make the
world aseptic, without neglecting to enjoy a few of the septic things before they should pass away.

His purpose was, after finishing his sleeping sickness report, to found a school of tropical medicine in New York.

He besieged McGurk and the wealthy Mr. Minnigen who was Tubbs's new patron, and in and out of season he besieged Gottlieb.

He adored Gottlieb and made noises about it. Gottlieb admired his courage and his hatred of commercialism, but his presence Gottlieb could not
endure. He was flustered by Sondelius's hilarity, his compliments, his bounding optimism, his inaccuracy, his boasting, his oppressive bigness.
It may be that Gottlieb resented the fact that though Sondelius was only eleven years younger--fifty-eight to Gottlieb's sixty-nine--he seemed
thirty years younger, half a century gayer.

When Sondelius perceived this grudgingness he tried to overcome it by being more noisy and complimentary and enthusiastic than ever. On
Gottlieb's birthday he gave him a shocking smoking-jacket of cherry and mauve velvet, and when he called at Gottlieb's flat, which was often,
Gottlieb had to put on the ghastly thing and sit humming while Sondelius assaulted him with roaring condemnations of mediocre soup and mediocre
musicians. . . . That Sondelius gave up surprisingly decorative dinner-parties for these calls, Gottlieb never knew.

Martin turned to Sondelius for courage as he turned to Terry for concentration. Courage and concentration were needed, in these days of an
Institute gone insane, if a man was to do his work.

And Martin was doing it.


V


After a consultation with Gottlieb and a worried conference with Leora about the danger of handling the germs, he had gone on to bubonic plague,
to the possibilities of preventing it and curing it with phage.

To have heard him asking Sondelius about his experience in plague epidemics, one would have believed that Martin found the Black Death
delightful. To have beheld him infecting lean snaky rats with the horror, all the while clucking to them and calling them pet names, one would
have known him mad.

He found that rats fed with phage failed to come down with plague; that after phage-feeding, Bacillus pestis disappeared from carrier rats which,
without themselves being killed thereby, harbored and spread chronic plague; and that, finally, he could cure the disease. He was as absorbed and
happy and nervous as in the first days of the X Principle. He worked all night. . . . At the microscope, under a lone light, fishing out with a
glass pipette drawn fine as a hair one single plague bacillus.

To protect himself from infection by the rat-fleas he wore, while he worked with the animals, rubber gloves, high leather boots, straps about his
sleeves. These precautions thrilled him, and to the others at McGurk they had something of the esoteric magic of the alchemists. He became a bit
of a hero and a good deal of a butt. No more than hearty business men in offices or fussy old men in villages are researchers free from the
tedious vice of jovial commenting. The chemists and biologists called him "The Pest," refused to come to his room, and pretended to avoid him in
the corridors.

As he went fluently on from experiment to experiment, as the drama of science obsessed him, he thought very well of himself and found himself
taken seriously by the others. He Published one cautious paper on phage in plague, which was mentioned in numerous scientific journals. Even the
harassed Gottlieb was commendatory, though he could give but little attention and no help. But Terry Wickett remained altogether cool. He showed
for Martin's somewhat brilliant work only enough enthusiasm to indicate that he was not jealous; he kept poking in to ask whether, with his new
experimentation, Martin was continuing his quest for the fundamental nature of all phage, and his study of physical chemistry.

Then Martin had such an assistant as has rarely been known, and that assistant was Gustaf Sondelius.

Sondelius was discouraged regarding his school of tropical medicine. He was looking for new trouble. He had been through several epidemics, and
he viewed plague with affectionate hatred. When he understood Martin's work he gloated, "Hey, Yesus! Maybe you got the t'ing that will be better
than Yersin or Haffkine or anybody! Maybe you cure all the world of plague--the poor devils in India--millions of them. Let me in!"

He became Martin's collaborator; unpaid, tireless, not very skillful, valuable in his buoyancy. As well as Martin he loved irregularity; by
principle he never had his meals at the same hours two days in succession, and by choice he worked all night and made poetry, rather bad poetry,
at dawn.

Martin had always been the lone prowler. Possibly the thing he most liked in Leora was her singular ability to be cheerfully non-existent even
when she was present. At first he was annoyed by Sondelius's disturbing presence, however interesting he found his fervors about plague-bearing
rats (whom Sondelius hated not at all but whom, with loving zeal, he had slaughtered by the million, with a romantic absorption in traps and
poison gas). But the Sondelius who was raucous in conversation could be almost silent at work. He knew exactly how to hold the animals while
Martin did intrapleural injections; he made cultures of Bacillus pestis; when Martin's technician had gone home at but a little after midnight
(the garcon liked Martin and thought well enough of science, but he was prejudiced in favor of six hours' daily sleep and sometimes seeing his
wife and children in Harlem), then Sondelius cheerfully sterilized glassware and needles, and lumbered up to the animal house to bring down
victims.

The change whereby Sondelius was turned from Martin's master to his slave was so unconscious, and Sondelius, for all his Pickerbaughian love of
sensationalism, cared so little about mastery or credit, that neither of them considered that there had been a change. They borrowed cigarettes
from each other; they went out at the most improbable hours to have flap-jacks and coffee at an all-night lunch; and together they candled test-
tubes charged with death.




Chapter 31



From Yunnan in China, from the clattering bright bazaars, crept something invisible in the sun and vigilant by dark, creeping, sinister,
ceaseless; creeping across the Himalayas, down through walled market-places, across a desert, along hot yellow rivers, into an American
missionary compound--creeping, silent, sure; and here and there on its way a man was black and stilled with plague.

In Bombay a new dock-guard, unaware of things, spoke boisterously over his family rice of a strange new custom of the rats.

Those princes of the sewer, swift to dart and turn, had gone mad. They came out on the warehouse floor, ignoring the guard, springing up as
though (the guard said merrily) they were trying to fly, and straightway falling dead. He had poked at them, but they did not move.

Three days later that dock-guard died of the plague.

Before he died, from his dock a ship with a cargo of wheat steamed off to Marseilles. There was no sickness on it all the way; there was no
reason why at Marseilles it should not lie next to a tramp steamer, nor why that steamer, pitching down to Montevideo with nothing more
sensational than a discussion between the supercargo and the second officer in the matter of a fifth ace, should not berth near the S.S. Pendown
Castle, bound for the island of St. Hubert to add cocoa to its present cargo of lumber.

On the way to St. Hubert, a Goanese seedie boy and after him the messroom steward on the Pendown Castle died of what the skipper called
influenza. A greater trouble was the number of rats which, ill satisfied with lumber as diet, scampered up to the food-stores, then into the
forecastle, and for no reason perceptible died on the open decks. They danced comically before they died, and lay in the scuppers stark and
ruffled.

So the Pendown Castle came to Blackwater, the capital and port of St. Hubert.

It is a little isle of the southern West Indies, but St. Hubert supports a hundred thousand people--English planters and clerks, Hindu road-
makers, Negro cane-hands, Chinese merchants. There is history along its sands and peaks. Here the buccaneers careened their ships; here the
Marquess of Wimsbury, when he had gone mad, took to repairing clocks and bade his slaves burn all the sugar-cane.

Hither that peasant beau, Gaston Lopo, brought Madame de Merlemont, and dwelt in fashionableness till the slaves whom he had often relished to
lash came on him shaving, and straightway the lather was fantastically smeared with blood.

Today, St. Hubert is all sugar-cane and Ford cars, oranges and plantains and the red and yellow pods of cocoa, bananas and rubber trees and
jungles of bamboo, Anglican churches and tin chapels, colored washerwomen busy at the hollows in the roots of silk-cotton trees, steamy heat and
royal palms and the immortelle that fills the valleys with crimson; today it is all splendor and tourist dullness and cabled cane-quotations,
against the unsparing sun.

Blackwater, flat and breathless town of tin-roofed plaster houses and incandescent bone-white roads, of salmon-red hibiscus and balconied stores
whose dark depths open without barrier from the stifling streets, has the harbor to one side and a swamp to the other. But behind it are the
Penrith Hills, on whose wholesome and palm-softened heights is Government House, looking to the winking sails.

Here lived in bulky torpor His Excellency the Governor of St. Hubert, Colonel Sir Robert Fairlamb.

Sir Robert Fairlamb was an excellent fellow, a teller of mess-room stories, one who in a heathen day never smoked till the port had gone seven
times round; but he was an execrable governor and a worried governor. The man whose social rank was next to his own--the Hon. Cecil Eric George
Twyford, a lean, active, high-nosed despot who owned and knew rod by snakewrithing rod some ten thousand acres of cane in St. Swithin's Parish--
Twyford said that His Excellency was a "potty and snoring fool," and versions of the opinion came not too slowly to Fairlamb. Then, to destroy
him complete, the House of Assembly, which is the St. Hubert legislature, was riven by the feud of Kellett the Red Leg and George William
Vertigan.

The Red Legs were a tribe of Scotch-Irish poor whites who had come to St. Hubert as indentured servants two hundred years before. Most of them
were still fishermen and plantation-foremen, but one of them, Kellett, a man small-mouthed and angry and industrious, had risen from office-boy
to owner of a shipping company, and while his father still spread his nets on the beach at Point Carib, Kellett was the scourge of the House of
Assembly and a hound for economy--particularly any economy which would annoy his fellow legislator, George William Vertigan.

George William, who was sometimes known as "Old Jeo Win" and sometimes as "The King of the Ice House" (that enticing and ruinous bar), had been
born behind a Little Bethel in Lancashire. He owned The Blue Bazaar, the hugest stores in St. Hubert; he caused tobacco to be smuggled into
Venezuela; he was as full of song and incaution and rum as Kellett the Red Leg was full of figures and envy and decency.

Between them, Kellett and George William split the House of Assembly. There could be, to a respectable person, no question as to their merits:
Kellett the just and earnest man of domesticity whose rise was an inspiration to youth; George William the gambler, the lusher, the smuggler, the
liar, the seller of shoddy cottons, a person whose only excellence was his cheap good nature.

Kellett's first triumph in economy was to pass an ordinance removing the melancholy Cockney (a player of oboes) who was the official rat-catcher
of St. Hubert.

George William Vertigan insisted in debate, and afterward privily to Sir Robert Fairlamb, that rats destroy food and perhaps spread disease, and
His Excellency must veto the bill. Sir Robert was troubled. He called in The Surgeon General, Dr. R. E. Inchcape Jones (but he preferred to be
called Mister, not Doctor).

Dr. Inchcape Jones was a thin, tall, fretful, youngish man, without bowels. He had come out from Home only two years before, and he wanted to go
back Home, to that particular part of Home represented by tennis-teas in Surrey. He remarked to Sir Robert that rats and their ever faithful
fleas do carry diseases--plague and infectious jaundice and rat-bite fever and possibly leprosy--but these diseases did not and therefore could
not exist in St. Hubert, except for leprosy, which was a natural punishment of outlandish Native Races. In fact, noted Inchcape Jones, nothing
did exist in St. Hubert except malaria, dengue, and a general beastly dullness, and if Red Legs like Kellett longed to die of plague and rat-bite
fever, why should decent people object?

So by the sovereign power of the House of Assembly of St. Hubert, and of His Excellency the Governor, the Cockney rat-catcher and his jiggling
young colored assistant were commanded to cease to exist. The rat-catcher became a chauffeur. He drove Canadian and American tourists, who
stopped over at St. Hubert for a day or two between Barbados and Trinidad, along such hill-trails as he considered most easy to achieve with a
second-hand motor, and gave them misinformation regarding the flowers. The rat-catcher's assistant became a respectable smuggler and leader of a
Wesleyan choir. And as for the rats themselves, they flourished, they were glad in the land, and each female produced from ten to two hundred
offspring every year.

They were not often seen by day. "The rats aren't increasing; the cats kill 'em," said Kellett the Red Leg. But by darkness they gamboled in the
warehouses and in and out of the schooners along the quay. They ventured countryward, and lent their fleas to a species of ground squirrels which
were plentiful about the village of Carib.

A year and a half after the removal of the rat-catcher, when the Pendown Castle came in from Montevideo and moored by the Councillor Pier, it was
observed by ten thousand glinty small eyes among the piles.

As a matter of routine, certainly not as a thing connected with the deaths from what the skipper had called influenza, the crew of the Pendown
Castle put rat-shields on the mooring hawsers, but they did not take up the gang-plank at night, and now and then a rat slithered ashore to find
among its kin in Blackwater more unctuous fare than hardwood lumber. The Pendown sailed amiably for home, and from Avonmouth came to Surgeon
General Inchcape Jones a cable announcing that the ship was held, that others of the crew had died . . . and died of plague.

In the curt cablegram the word seemed written in bone-scorching fire.

Two days before the cable came, a Blackwater lighterman had been smitten by an unknown ill, very unpleasant, with delirium and buboes. Inchcape
Jones said that it could not be plague, because there never was plague in St. Hubert. His confrere, Stokes, retorted that perhaps it couldn't be
plague, but it damn' well WAS plague.

Dr. Stokes was a wiry, humorless man, the parish medical officer of St. Swithin Parish. He did not remain in the rustic reaches of St. Swithin,
where he belonged, but snooped all over the island, annoying Inchcape Jones. He was an M.B. of Edinburgh; he had served in the African bush; he
had had black-water fever and cholera and most other reasonable afflictions; and he had come to St. Hubert only to recover his red blood
corpuscles and to disturb the unhappy Inchcape Jones. He was not a nice man; he had beaten Inchcape Jones at tennis, with a nasty, unsporting
serve--the sort of serve you'd expect from an American.

And this Stokes, rather a bounder, a frightful bore, fancied himself as an amateur bacteriologist! It was a bit thick to have him creeping about
the docks, catching rats, making cultures from the bellies of their fleas, and barging in--sandy-headed and red-faced, thin and unpleasant--to
insist that they bore plague.

"My dear fellow, there's always some Bacillus pestis among rats," said Inchcape Jones, in a kindly but airy way.

When the lighterman died, Stokes irritatingly demanded that it be openly admitted that the plague had come to St. Hubert.

"Even if it was plague, which is not certain," said Inchcape Jones, "there's no reason to cause a row and frighten everybody. It was a sporadic
case. There won't be any more."

There were more, immediately. In a week three other waterfront workers and a fisherman at Point Carib were down with something which, even
Inchcape Jones acknowledged, was uncomfortably like the description of plague in "Manson's Tropical Diseases": "a prodromal stage characterized
by depression, anorexia, aching of the limbs," then the fever, the vertigo, the haggard features, the bloodshot and sunken eyes, the buboes in
the groin. It was not a pretty disease. Inchcape Jones ceased being chattery and ever so jolly about picnics, and became almost as grim as
Stokes. But publicly he still hoped and denied and St. Hubert did not know . . . did not know.


II


To drinking men and wanderers, the pleasantest place in the rather dull and tin-roofed town of Blackwater is the bar and restaurant called the
Ice House.

It is on the floor above the Kellett Shipping Agency and the shop where the Chinaman who is supposed to be a graduate of Oxford sells carved
tortoise, and cocoanuts in the horrible likeness of a head shrunken by headhunters. Except for the balcony, where one lunches and looks down on
squatting breech-clouted Hindu beggars, and unearthly pearl-pale English children at games in the savannah, all of the Ice House is a large and
dreaming dimness wherein you are but half conscious of Moorish grills, a touch of gilt on white-painted walls, a heavy, amazingly long mahogany
bar, slot machines, and marble-topped tables beyond your own.

Here, at the cocktail-hour, are all the bloodless, sun-helmeted white rulers of St. Hubert who haven't quite the caste to belong to the
Devonshire Club: the shipping-office clerks, the merchants who have no grandfathers, the secretaries to the Inchcape Joneses, the Italians and
Portuguese who smuggle into Venezuela.

Calmed by rum swizzles, those tart and commanding aperitifs which are made in their deadly perfection only by the twirling swizzle-sticks of the
darkies at the Ice House bar, the exiles become peaceful, and have another swizzle, and grow certain again (as for twenty-four hours, since the
last cocktail-hour, they have not been certain) that next year they will go Home. Yes, they will taper off, take exercise in the dawn coolness,
stop drinking, become strong and successful, and go Home . . . the Lotus Eaters, tears in their eyes when in the dimness of the Ice House they
think of Piccadilly or the heights of Quebec, of Indiana or Catalonia or the clogs of Lancashire. . . . They never go Home. But always they have
new reassuring cocktail-hours at the Ice House, until they die, and the other lost men come to their funerals and whisper one to another that
they ARE going Home.

Now of the Ice House, George William Vertigan, owner of The Blue Bazaar, was unchallenged monarch. He was a thick, ruddy man, the sort of
Englishman one sees in the Midlands, the sort that is either very Non-Conformist or very alcoholic, and George William was not Non-Conformist.
Each day from five to seven he was tilted against the bar, never drunk, never altogether sober, always full of melody and kindliness; the one man
who did not long for Home, because outside the Ice House he remembered no home.

When it was whispered that a man had died of something which might be plague, George William announced to his court that if it were true, it
would serve Kellett the Red Leg jolly well right. But everyone knew that the West Indian climate prevented plague.

The group, quivering on the edge of being panicky, were reassured.

It was two nights afterward that there writhed into the Ice House a rumor that George William Vertigan was dead.


III


No one dared speak of it, whether in the Devonshire Club or the Ice House or the breeze-fluttered, sea-washed park where the Negroes gather after
working hours, but they heard, almost without hearing, of this death--and this--and another. No one liked to shake hands with his oldest friend;
everyone fled from everyone else, though the rats loyally stayed with them; and through the island galloped the Panic, which is more murderous
than its brother, the Plague.

Still there was no quarantine, no official admission. Inchcape Jones vomited feeble proclamations of the inadvisability of too-large public
gatherings, and wrote to London to inquire about Haffkine's prophylactic, but to Sir Robert Fairlamb he protested, "Honestly, there's only been a
few deaths and I think it's all passed over. As for these suggestions of Stokes that we burn the village of Carib, merely because they've had
several cases--why, it's barbarous! And it's been conveyed to me that if we were to establish a quarantine, the merchants would take the
strongest measures against the administration. It would ruin the tourist and export business."

But Stokes of St. Swithin's secretly wrote to Dr. Max Gottlieb, Director of the McGurk Institute, that the plague was ready to flare up and
consume all the West Indies, and would Dr. Gottlieb do something about it?




Chapter 32



There may have been in the shadowy heart of Max Gottlieb a diabolic insensibility to divine pity, to suffering humankind; there may have been
mere resentment of the doctors who considered his science of value only as it was handy to advertising their business of healing; there may have
been the obscure and passionate and unscrupulous demand of genius for privacy. Certainly he who had lived to study the methods of immunizing
mankind against disease had little interest in actually using those methods. He was like a fabulous painter, so contemptuous of popular taste
that after a lifetime of creation he should destroy everything he has done, lest it be marred and mocked by the dull eyes of the crowd.

The letter from Dr. Stokes was not his only intimation that plague was striding through St. Hubert, that tomorrow it might be leaping to
Barbados, to the Virgin Islands . . . to New York. Ross McGurk was an emperor of the new era, better served than any cloistered satrap of old.
His skippers looked in at a hundred ports; his railroads penetrated jungles; his correspondents whispered to him of the next election in
Colombia, of the Cuban cane-crop, of what Sir Robert Fairlamb had said to Dr. R. E. Inchcape Jones on his bungalow porch. Ross McGurk, and after
him Max Gottlieb, knew better than did the Lotus Eaters of the Ice House how much plague there was in St. Hubert.

Yet Gottlieb did not move, but pondered the unknown chemical structure of antibodies, interrupted by questions as to whether Pearl Robbins had
enough pencils, whether it would be quite all right for Dr. Holabird to receive the Lettish scientific mission this afternoon, so that Dr.
Sholtheis might attend the Anglican Conference on the Reservation of the Host.

He was assailed by inquirers: public health officials, one Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh, a congressman who was said to be popular in Washington, Gustaf
Sondelius, and a Martin Arrowsmith who could not (whether because he was too big or too small) quite attain Gottlieb's concentrated indifference.

It was rumored that Arrowsmith of McGurk had something which might eradicate plague. Letters demanded of Gottlieb, "Can you stand by, with the
stuff of salvation in your hands, and watch thousands of these unfortunate people dying in St. Hubert, and what is more are you going to let the
dreaded plague gain a foothold in the Western hemisphere? My dear man, this is the time to come out of your scientific reverie and act!"

Then Ross McGurk, over a comfortable steak, hinted, not too diffidently, that this was the opportunity for the Institute to acquire world-fame.

Whether it was the compulsion of McGurk or the demands of the public-spirited, or whether Gottlieb's own imagination aroused enough to visualize
the far-off misery of the blacks in the canefields, he summoned Martin and remarked:

"It comes to me that there is pneumonic plague in Manchuria and bubonic in St. Hubert, in the West Indies. If I could trust you, Martin, to use
the phage with only half your patients and keep the others as controls, under normal hygienic conditions but without the phage, then you could
make an absolute determination of its value as complete as what we have of mosquito transmission of yellow fever, and then I would send you down
to St. Hubert. What do you t'ink?"

Martin swore by Jacques Loeb that he would observe test conditions; he would determine forever the value of phage by the contrast between
patients treated and untreated and so, perhaps, end all plague forever; he would harden his heart and keep clear his eyes.

"We will get Sondelius to go along," said Gottlieb. "He will do the big boom-boom and so bring us the credit in the newspapers which, I am now
told, a Director must obtain."

Sondelius did not merely consent--he insisted.

Martin had never seen a foreign country--he could not think of Canada, where he had spent a vacation as hotel-waiter, as foreign to him. He could
not comprehend that he was really going to a place of palm trees and brown faces and languid Christmas Eves. He was busy (while Sondelius was out
ordering linen suits and seeking a proper new sun helmet) making anti-plague phage on a large scale: a hundred liters of it, sealed in tiny
ampules. He felt like the normal Martin, but conferences and powers were considering him.

There was a meeting of the Board of Trustees to advise Martin and Sondelius as to their methods. For it the President of the University of
Wilmington gave up a promising interview with a millionaire alumnus, Ross McGurk gave up a game of golf, and one of the three university
scientists arrived by aeroplane. Called in from the laboratory, a rather young man in a wrinkled soft collar, dizzy still with the details of
Erlenmeyer flasks, infusorial earth, and sterile filters, Martin was confronted by the Men of Measured Merriment, and found that he was no longer
concealed in the invisibility of insignificance but regarded as a leader who was expected not only to produce miracles but to explain beforehand
how important and mature and miraculous he was.

He was shy before the spectacled gravity of the five Trustees as they sat, like a Supreme Court, at the dais table in Bonanza Hall--Gottlieb a
little removed, also trying to look grave and supreme. But Sondelius rolled in, enthusiastic and tremendous, and suddenly Martin was not shy, nor
was he respectful to his one-time master in public health.

Sondelius wanted to exterminate all the rodents in St. Hubert, to enforce a quarantine, to use Yersin's serum and Haffkine's prophylactic, and to
give Martin's phage to everybody in St. Hubert, all at once, all with everybody.

Martin protested. For the moment it might have been Gottlieb speaking.

He knew, he flung at them, that humanitarian feeling would make it impossible to use the poor devils of sufferers as mere objects of experiment,
but he must have at least a few real test cases, and he was damned, even before the Trustees he was damned, if he would have his experiment so
mucked up by multiple treatment that they could never tell whether the cures were due to Yersin or Haffkine or phage or none of them.

The Trustees adopted his plan. After all, while they desired to save humanity, wasn't it better to have it saved by a McGurk representative than
by Yersin or Haffkine or the outlandish Sondelius?

It was agreed that if Martin could find in St. Hubert a district which was comparatively untouched by the plague, he should there endeavor to
have test cases, one half injected with phage, one half untreated. In the badly afflicted districts, he might give the phage to everyone, and if
the disease slackened unusually, that would be a secondary proof.

Whether the St. Hubert government, since they had not asked for aid, would give Martin power to experiment and Sondelius police authority, the
Trustees did not know. The Surgeon General, a chap named Inchcape Jones, had replied to their cables: "No real epidemic not need help." But
McGurk promised that he would pull his numerous wires to have the McGurk Commission (Chairman, Martin Arrowsmith, B.A., M.D.) welcomed by the
authorities.

Sondelius still insisted that in this crisis mere experimentation was heartless, yet he listened to Martin's close-reasoned fury with enthusiasm
which this bull-necked eternal child had for anything which sounded new and preferably true. He did not, like Almus Pickerbaugh, regard a
difference of scientific opinion as an attack on his character.

He talked of going on his own, independent of Martin and McGurk, but he was won back when the Trustees murmured that though they really did wish
the dear man wouldn't fool with sera, they would provide him with apparatus to kill all the rats he wanted.

Then Sondelius was happy:

"And you watch me! I am the captain-general of rat-killers! I yoost walk into a warehouse and the rats say, 'There's that damn' old Uncle Gustaf-
-what's the use?' and they turn up their toes and die! I am yoost as glad I have you people behind me, because I am broke--I went and bought some
oil stock that don't look so good now--and I shall need a lot of hydrocyanic acid gas. Oh, those rats! You watch me! Now I go and telegraph I
can't keep a lecture engagement next week--huh! me lecture to a women's college, me that can talk rat-language and know seven beautiful deadly
kind of traps!"


II


Martin had never known greater peril than swimming a flood as a hospital intern. From waking to midnight he was too busy making phage and
receiving unsolicited advice from all the Institute staff to think of the dangers of a plague epidemic, but when he went to bed, when his brain
was still revolving with plans, he pictured rather too well the chance of dying, unpleasantly.

When Leora received the idea that he was going off to a death-haunted isle, to a place of strange ways and trees and faces (a place, probably,
where they spoke funny languages and didn't have movies or tooth-paste), she took the notion secretively away with her, to look at it and examine
it, precisely as she often stole little foods from the table and hid them and meditatively ate them at odd hours of the night, with the pleased
expression of a bad child. Martin was glad that she did not add to his qualms by worrying. Then, after three days, she spoke:

"I'm going with you."

"You are not!"

"Well. . . . I am!"

"It's not safe."

"Silly! Of course it is. You can shoot your nice old phage into me, and then I'll be absolutely all right. Oh, I have a husband who cures things,
I have! I'm going to blow in a lot of money for thin dresses, though I bet St. Hubert isn't any hotter than Dakota can be in August."

"Listen! Lee, darling! Listen! I do think the phage will immunize against the plague--you bet I'll be mighty well injected with it myself!--but I
don't KNOW, and even if it were practically perfect, there'd always be some people it wouldn't protect. You simply can't go, sweet. Now I'm
terribly sleepy--"

Leora seized his lapels, as comic fierce as a boxing kitten, but her eyes were not comic, nor her wailing voice; age-old wail of the soldiers'
women:

"Sandy, don't you know I haven't any life outside of you? I might've had, but honestly, I've been glad to let you absorb me. I'm a lazy, useless,
ignorant scut, except as maybe I keep you comfortable. If you were off there, and I didn't know you were all right, or if you died and somebody
else cared for your body that I've loved so--haven't I loved it, dear?--I'd go mad. I mean it--can't you see I mean it--I'd go mad! It's just--
I'm you, and I got to be with you. And I WILL help you! Make your media and everything. You know how often I've helped you. Oh, I'm not much good
at McGurk, with all your awful' complicated jiggers, but I did help you at Nautilus--I DID help you, didn't I?--and maybe in St. Hubert"--her
voice was the voice of women in midnight terror--"maybe you won't find anybody that can help you even my little bit, and I'll cook and
everything--"

"Darling, don't make it harder for me. Going to be hard enough in any case--"

"Damn you, Sandy Arrowsmith, don't you dare use those old stuck-up expressions that husbands have been drooling out to wives forever and ever!
I'm not a wife, any more'n you're a husband. You're a rotten husband! You neglect me absolutely. The only time you know what I've got on is when
some doggone button slips--and how they can pull off when a person has gone over 'em and sewed 'em all on again is simply beyond me!--and then
you bawl me out. But I don't care. I'd rather have you than any decent husband. . . . Besides. I'm going."

Gottlieb opposed it, Sondelius roared about it, Martin worried about it, but Leora went, and--his only act of craftiness as Director of the
Institute--Gottlieb made her "Secretary and Technical Assistant to the McGurk Plague and Bacteriophage Commission to the Lesser Antilles," and
blandly gave her a salary.


III


The day before the Commission sailed, Martin insisted that Sondelius take his first injection of phage. He refused.

"No, I will not touch it till you get converted to humanity, Martin, and give it to everybody in St. Hubert. And you will! Wait till you see them
suffering by the thousand. You have not seen such a thing. Then you will forget science and try to save everybody. You shall not inject me till
you will inject all my Negro friends down there too."

That afternoon Gottlieb called Martin in. He spoke with hesitation:

"You're off for Blackwater tomorrow."

"Yes, sir."

"Hm. You may be gone some time. I-- Martin, you are my oldest friend in New York, you and the good Miriam. Tell me: At first you and Terry
t'ought I should not take up the Directorship. Don't you t'ink I was wise?"

Martin stared, then hastily he lied and said that which was comforting and expected.

"I am glad you t'ink so. You have known so long what I have tried to do. I haf faults, but I t'ink I begin to see a real scientific note coming
into the Institute at last, after the popoolarity-chasing of Tubbs and Holabird. . . . I wonder how I can discharge Holabird, that pants-presser
of science? If only he dit not know Capitola so well--socially, they call it! But anyway--

"There are those that said Max Gottlieb could not do the child job of running an institution. Huh! Buying note-books! Hiring women that sweep
floors! Or no--the floors are swept by women hired by the superintendent of the building, nicht wahr? But anyway--

"I did not make a rage when Terry and you doubted. I am a great fellow for allowing everyone his opinion. But it pleases me--I am very fond of
you two boys--the only real sons I have--" Gottlieb laid his withered hand on Martin's arm. "It pleases me that you see now I am beginning to
make a real scientific Institute. Though I have enemies. Martin, you would t'ink I was joking, if I told you the plotting against me--

"Even Yeo. I t'ought he was my friend. I t'ought he was a real biologist. But just today he comes to me and says he cannot get enough sea-urchins
for his experiments. As if I could make sea-urchins out of thin air! He said I keep him short of all materials. Me! That have always stood for--I
do not care what they PAY scientists, but always I have stood, against that fool Silva and all of them, all my enemies--

"You do not know how many enemies I have, Martin! They do not dare show their faces. They smile to me, but they whisper-- I will show Holabird--
always he plot against me and try to win over Pearl Robbins, but she is a good girl, she knows what I am doing, but--"

He looked perplexed; he peered at Martin as though he did not quite recognize him, and begged:

"Martin, I grow old--not in years--it is a lie I am over seventy--but I have my worries. Do you mind if I give you advice as I have done so
often, so many years? Though you are not a schoolboy now in Queen City--no, at Winnemac it was. You are a man and you are a genuine worker. But--

"Be sure you do not let anything, not even your own good kind heart, spoil your experiment at St. Hubert. I do not make funniness about
humanitarianism as I used to; sometimes now I t'ink the vulgar and contentious human race may yet have as much grace and good taste as the cats.
But if this is to be, there must be knowledge. So many men, Martin, are kind and neighborly; so few have added to knowledge. You have the chance!
You may be the man who ends all plague, and maybe old Max Gottlieb will have helped, too, hein, maybe?

"You must not be just a good doctor at St. Hubert. You must pity, oh, so much the generation after generation yet to come that you can refuse to
let yourself indulge in pity for the men you will see dying.

"Dying. . . . It will be peace.

"Let nothing, neither beautiful pity nor fear of your own death, keep you from making this plague experiment complete. And as my friend-- If you
do this, something will yet have come out of my Directorship. If but one fine thing could come, to justify me--"

When Martin came sorrowing into his laboratory he found Terry Wickett waiting.

"Say, Slim," Terry blurted, "just wanted to butt in and suggest, now for St. Gottlieb's sake keep your phage notes complete and up-to-date, and
keep 'em in ink!"

"Terry, it looks to me as if you thought I had a fine chance of not coming back with the notes myself."

"Aw, what's biting you!" said Terry feebly.


IV


The epidemic in St. Hubert must have increased, for on the day before the McGurk Commission sailed, Dr. Inchcape Jones declared that the island
was quarantined. People might come in, but no one could leave. He did this despite the fretting of the Governor, Sir Robert Fairlamb, and the
protests of the hotel-keepers who fed on tourists, the ex-rat-catchers who drove the same, Kellett the Red Leg who sold them tickets, and all the
other representatives of sound business in St. Hubert.


V


Besides his ampules of phage and his Luer syringes for injection, Martin made personal preparations for the tropics. He bought, in seventeen
minutes, a Palm Beach suit, two new shirts, and, as St. Hubert was a British possession and as he had heard that all Britishers carry canes, a
stick which the shop-keeper guaranteed to be as good as genuine malacca.


VI


They started, Martin and Leora and Gustaf Sondelius, on a winter morning, on the six-thousand-ton steamer St. Buryan of the McGurk Line, which
carried machinery and flour and codfish and motors to the Lesser Antilles and brought back molasses, cocoa, avocados, Trinidad asphalt. A score
of winter tourists made the round trip, but only a score, and there was little handkerchief-waving.

The McGurk Line pier was in South Brooklyn, in a district of brown anonymous houses. The sky was colorless above dirty snow. Sondelius seemed
well content. As they drove upon a wharf littered with hides and boxes and disconsolate steerage passengers, he peered out of their crammed
taxicab and announced that the bow of the St. Buryan--all they could see of it--reminded him of the Spanish steamer he had taken to the Cape
Verde Isles. But to Martin and Leora, who had read of the drama of departure, of stewards darting with masses of flowers, dukes and divorcees
being interviewed, and bands playing "The Star-spangled Banner," the St. Buryan was unromantic and its ferry-like casualness was discouraging.

Only Terry came to see them off, bringing a box of candy for Leora.

Martin had never ridden a craft larger than a motor launch. He stared up at the black wall of the steamer's side. As they mounted the gangplank
he was conscious that he was cutting himself off from the safe, familiar land, and he was embarrassed by the indifference of more experienced-
looking passengers, staring down from the rail. Aboard, it seemed to him that the forward deck looked like the backyard of an old-iron dealer,
that the St. Buryan leaned too much to one side, and that even in the dock she swayed undesirably.

The whistle snorted contemptuously; the hawsers were cast off. Terry stood on the pier till the steamer, with Martin and Leora and Sondelius
above, their stomachs pressed against the rail, had slid past him, then he abruptly clumped away.

Martin realized that he was off for the perilous sea and the perilous plague; that there was no possibility of leaving the ship till they should
reach some distant island. This narrow deck, with its tarry lines between planks, was his only home. Also, in the breeze across the wide harbor
he was beastly cold, and in general God help him!

As the St. Buryan was warped out into the river, as Martin was suggesting to his Commission, "How about going downstairs and seeing if we can
raise a drink?" there was the sound of a panicky taxicab on the pier, the sight of a lean, tall figure running--but so feebly, so shakily--and
they realized that it was Max Gottlieb, peering for them, tentatively raising his thin arm in greeting, not finding them at the rail, and turning
sadly away.


VII


As representatives of Ross McGurk and his various works, evil and benevolent, they had the two suites de luxe on the boat deck.

Martin was cold off snow-blown Sandy Hook, sick off Cape Hatteras, and tired and relaxed between; with him Leora was cold, and in a ladylike
manner she was sick, but she was not at all tired. She insisted on conveying information to him, from the West Indian guide-book which she had
earnestly bought.

Sondelius was conspicuously all over the ship. He had tea with the Captain, scouse with the fo'c'sle, and intellectual conferences with the Negro
missionary in the steerage. He was to be heard--always he was to be heard: singing on the promenade deck, defending Bolshevism against the
boatswain, arguing oil-burning with the First Officer, and explaining to the bar steward how to make a gin sling. He held a party for the
children in the steerage, and he borrowed from the First Officer a volume of navigation to study between parties.

He gave flavor to the ordinary cautious voyage of the St. Buryan, but he made a mistake. He was courteous to Miss Gwilliam; he tried to cheer her
on a seemingly lonely adventure.

Miss Gwilliam came from one of the best families in her section of New Jersey; her father was a lawyer and a church-warden, her grandfather had
been a solid farmer. That she had not married, at thirty-three, was due entirely to the preference of modern young men for jazz-dancing hussies;
and she was not only a young lady of delicate reservations but also a singer; in fact, she was going to the West Indies to preserve the wonders
of primitive art for reverent posterity in the native ballads she would collect and sing to a delighted public--if only she learned how to sing.

She studied Gustaf Sondelius. He was a silly person, not in the least like the gentlemanly insurance-agents and office-managers she was
accustomed to meet at the country club, and what was worse, he did not ask her opinions on art and good form. His stories about generals and that
sort of people could be discounted as lies, for did he not associate with grimy engineers? He needed some of her gentle but merry chiding.

When they stood together at the rail and he chanted in his ludicrous up-and-down Swedish sing-song that it was a fine evening, she remarked,
"Well, Mr. Roughneck, have you been up to something smart again today? Or have you been giving somebody else a chance to talk, for once?"

She was placidly astonished when he clumped away with none of the obedient reverence which any example of cultured American womanhood has a right
to expect from all males, even foreigners.

Sondelius came to Martin lamenting, "Slim--if I may call you so, like Terry--I think you and your Gottlieb are right. There is no use saving
fools. It's a great mistake to be natural. One should always be a stuffed shirt, like old Tubbs. Then one would have respect even from artistic
New Jersey spinsters. . . . How strange is conceit! That I who have been cursed and beaten by so many Great Ones, who was once led out to be shot
in a Turkish prison, should never have been annoyed by them as by this smug wench. Ah, smugness! That is the enemy!"

Apparently he recovered from Miss Gwilliam. He was seen arguing with the ship's doctor about sutures in Negro skulls, and he invented a game of
deck cricket. But one evening when he sat reading in the "social hall," stooped over, wearing betraying spectacles and his mouth puckered, Martin
walked past the window and incredulously saw that Sondelius was growing old.


VIII


As he sat by Leora in a deck-chair, Martin studied her, really looked at her pale profile, after years when she had been a matter of course. He
pondered on her as he pondered on phage; he weightily decided that he had neglected her, and weightily he started right in to be a good husband.

"Now I have a chance to be human, Lee, I realize how lonely you must have been in New York."

"But I haven't."

"Don't be foolish! Of course you've been lonely! Well, when we get back, I'll take a little time off every day and we'll--we'll have walks and go
to the movies and everything. And I'll send you flowers, every morning. Isn't it a relief to just sit here! But I do begin to think and realize
how I've prob'ly neglected-- Tell me, honey, has it been too terribly dull?"

"Hunka. Really."

"No, but TELL me."

"There's nothing to tell."

"Now bang it, Leora, here when I DO have the first chance in eleven thousand years to think about you, and I come right out frankly and admit how
slack I've been-- And planning to send you flowers--"

"You look here, Sandy Arrowsmith! Quit bullying me! You want the luxury of harrowing yourself by thinking what a poor, bawling, wretched, story-
book wife I am. You're working up to become perfectly miserable if you can't enjoy being miserable. . . . It would be terrible, when we got back
to New York, if you did get on the job and devoted yourself to showing me a good time. You'd go at it like a bull. I'd have to be so dratted
grateful for the flowers every day--the days you didn't forget!--and the way you'd sling me off to the movies when I wanted to stay home and
snooze--"

"Well, by thunder, of all the--"

"No, please! You're dear and good, but you're so bossy that I've always got to be whatever YOU want, even if it's lonely. But--Maybe I'm lazy.
I'd rather just snoop around than have to work at being well-dressed and popular and all those jobs. I fuss over the flat--hang it, wish I'd had
the kitchen repainted while we're away, it's a NICE little kitchen--and I make believe read my French books, and go out for a walk, and look in
the windows, and eat an ice cream soda, and the day slides by. Sandy, I do love you awful' much; if I could, I'd be as ill-treated as the
dickens, so you could enjoy it, but I'm no good at educated lies, only at easy little ones like the one I told you last week--I said I hadn't
eaten any candy and didn't have a stomach-ache, and I'd eaten half a pound and I was as sick as a pup. . . . Gosh, I'm a good wife I am!"

They rolled from gray seas to purple and silver. By dusk they stood at the rail, and he felt the spaciousness of the sea, of life. Always he had
lived in his imagination. As he had blundered through crowds, an inconspicuous young husband trotting out to buy cold roast beef for dinner, his
brain-pan had been wide as the domed sky. He had seen not the streets, but microorganisms large as jungle monsters, miles of flasks cloudy with
bacteria, himself giving orders to his garcon, Max Gottlieb awesomely congratulating him. Always his dreams had clung about his work. Now, no
less passionately, he awoke to the ship, the mysterious sea, the presence of Leora, and he cried to her, in the warm tropic winter dusk:

"Sweet, this is only the first of our big hikes! Pretty soon, if I'm successful in St. Hubert, I'll begin to count in science, and we'll go
abroad, to your France and England and Italy and everywhere!"

"Can we, do you think? Oh, Sandy! Going PLACES!"


IX


He never knew it but for an hour, in their cabin half-lighted from the lamps in their sitting-room beyond, she watched him sleeping.

He was not handsome; he was grotesque as a puppy napping on a hot afternoon. His hair was ruffled, his face was deep in the crumpled pillow he
had encircled with both his arms. She looked at him, smiling, with the stretched corners of her lips like tiny flung arrows.

"I do love him so when he's frowsy! Don't you see, Sandy, I was wise to come! You're so worn out. IT might get you, and nobody but me could nurse
you. Nobody knows all your cranky ways--about how you hate prunes and everything. Night and day I'll nurse you--the least whisper and I'll be
awake. And if you need ice bags and stuff-- And I'll HAVE ice, too, if I have to sneak into some millionaire's house and steal it out of his
highballs! My dear!"

She shifted the electric fan so that it played more upon him, and on soft toes she crept into their stiff sitting-room. It did not contain much
save a round table, a few chairs, and a Sybaritic glass and mahogany wall-cabinet whose purpose was never discovered.

"It's so sort of-- Aah! Pinched. I guess maybe I ought to fix it up somehow."

But she had no talent for the composing of chairs and pictures which brings humanness into a dead room. Never in her life had she spent three
minutes in arranging flowers. She looked doubtful, she smiled and turned out the light, and slipped in to him.

She lay on the coverlet of her berth, in the tropic languidness, a slight figure in a frivolous nightgown. She thought, "I like a small bedroom,
because Sandy is nearer and I don't get so scared by things. What a dratted bully the man is! Some day I'm going to up and say to him: 'You go to
the devil!' I will so! Darling, we will hike off to France together, just you and I, won't we!"

She was asleep, smiling, so thin a little figure--




Chapter 33



Misty mountains they saw, and on their flanks the palm-crowned fortifications built of old time against the pirates. In Martinique were white-
faced houses like provincial France, and a boiling market full of colored women with kerchiefs ultramarine and scarlet. They passed hot St.
Lucia, and Saba that is all one lone volcano. They devoured paw-paws and breadfruit and avocados, bought from coffee-colored natives who came
alongside in nervous small boats; they felt the languor of the isles, and panted before they approached Barbados.

Just beyond was St. Hubert.

None of the tourists had known of the quarantine. They were raging that the company should have taken them into danger. In the tepid wind they
felt the plague.

The skipper reassured them, in a formal address. Yes, they would stop at Blackwater, the port of St. Hubert, but they would anchor far out in the
harbor; and while the passengers bound for St. Hubert would be permitted to go ashore, in the port-doctor's launch, no one in St. Hubert would be
allowed to leave--nothing from that pest-hole would touch the steamer except the official mail, which the ship's surgeon would disinfect.

(The ship's surgeon was wondering, the while, how you disinfected mail--let's see--sulfur burning in the presence of moisture, wasn't it?)

The skipper had been trained in oratory by arguments with wharf-masters, and the tourists were reassured. But Martin murmured to his Commission,
"I hadn't thought of that. Once we go ashore, we'll be practically prisoners till the epidemic's over--if it ever does get over--prisoners with
the plague around us."

"Why, of course!" said Sondelius.


II


They left Bridgetown, the pleasant port of Barbados, by afternoon. It was late night, with most of the passengers asleep, when they arrived at
Blackwater. As Martin came out on the damp and vacant deck, it seemed unreal, harshly unfriendly, and of the coming battleground he saw nothing
but a few shore lights beyond uneasy water.

About their arrival there was something timorous and illicit. The ship's surgeon ran up and down, looking disturbed; the captain could be heard
growling on the bridge; the first officer hastened up to confer with him and disappeared below again; and there was no one to meet them. The
steamer waited, rolling in a swell, while from the shore seemed to belch a hot miasma.

"And here's where we're going to land and STAY!" Martin grunted to Leora, as they stood by their bags, their cases of phage, on the heaving,
black-shining deck near the top of the accommodation-ladder.

Passengers came out in dressing-gowns, chattering, "Yes, this must be the place, those lights there. Must be fierce. WHAT? Somebody going ashore?
Oh, sure those two doctors. Well, they got nerve. I certainly don't envy them!"

Martin heard.

From shore a pitching light made toward the ship, slid round the bow, and sidled to the bottom of the accommodation-ladder. In the haze of a
lantern held by a steward at the foot of the steps, Martin could see a smart covered launch, manned by darky sailors in naval uniform and glazed
black straw hats with ribbons, and commanded by a Scotch-looking man with some sort of a peaked uniform cap over a civilian jacket.

The captain clumped down the swinging steps beside the ship. While the launch bobbed, its wet canvas top glistening, he had a long and
complaining conference with the commander of the launch, and received a pouch of mail, the only thing to come aboard.

The ship's surgeon took it from the captain with aversion, grumbling, "Now where can I get a barrel to disinfect these darn' letters in?"

Martin and Leora and Sondelius waited, without option.

They had been joined by a thin woman in black whom they had not seen all the trip--one of the mysterious passengers who are never noticed till
they come on deck at landing. Apparently she was going ashore. She was pale, her hands twitching.

The captain shouted at them, "All right--all right--all right! You can go now. Hustle, please. I've got to get on. . . . Damn' nuisance."

The St. Buryan had not seemed large or luxurious, but it was a castle, steadfast among storms, its side a massy wall, as Martin crept down the
swaying stairs, thinking all at once, "We're in for it; like going to the scaffold--they lead you along--no chance to resist," and, "You're
letting your imagination run away with you; quit it now!" and, "Is it too late to make Lee stay behind, on the steamer?" and an agonized, "Oh,
Lord, are the stewards handling that phage carefully?" Then he was on the tiny square platform at the bottom of the accommodation-ladder, the
ship's side was high above him, lit by the round ports of cabins, and someone was helping him into the launch.

As the unknown woman in black came aboard, Martin saw in lantern light how her lips tightened once, then her whole face went blank, like one who
waited hopelessly.

Leora squeezed his hand, hard, as he helped her in.

He muttered, while the steamer whistled, "Quick! You can still go back! You must!"

"And leave the pretty launch? Why, Sandy! Just look at the elegant engine it's got! . . . Gosh, I'm scared blue!"

As the launch sputtered, swung round, and headed for the filtering of lights ashore, as it bowed its head and danced to the swell, the sandy-
headed official demanded of Martin:

"You're the McGurk Commission?"

"Yes."

"Good." He sounded pleased yet cold, a busy voice and humorless.

"Are you the port-doctor?" asked Sondelius.

"No, not exactly. I'm Dr. Stokes, of St. Swithin's Parish. We're all of us almost everything, nowadays. The port-doctor-- In fact he died couple
of days ago."

Martin grunted. But his imagination had ceased to agitate him.

"You're Dr. Sondelius, I imagine. I know your work in Africa, in German East--was out there myself. And you're Dr. Arrowsmith? I read your plague
phage paper. Much impressed. Now I have just the chance to say before we go ashore-- You'll both be opposed. Inchcape Jones, the S.G., has lost
his head. Running in circles, lancing buboes--afraid to burn Carib, where most of the infection is. Arrowsmith, I have a notion of what you may
want to do experimentally. If Inchcape balks, you come to me in my parish--if I'm still alive. Stokes, my name is. . . . Damn it, boy, what ARE
you doing? Trying to drift clear down to Venezuela? . . . Inchcape and H.E. are so afraid that they won't even cremate the bodies--some religious
prejudice among the blacks--obee or something."

"I see," said Martin.

"How many cases plague you got now?" said Sondelius.

"Lord knows. Maybe a thousand. And ten million rats. . . . I'm so sleepy! . . . Well, welcome, gentlemen--" He flung out his arms in a dry
hysteria. "Welcome to the Island of Hesperides!"

Out of darkness Blackwater swung toward them, low flimsy barracks on a low swampy plain stinking of slimy mud. Most of the town was dark, dark
and wickedly still. There was no face along the dim waterfront--warehouses, tram station, mean hotels--and they ground against a pier, they went
ashore, without attention from customs officials. There were no carriages, and the hotel-runners who once had pestered tourists landing from the
St. Buryan, whatever the hour, were dead now or hidden.

The thin mysterious woman passenger vanished, staggering with her suit-case--she had said no word, and they never saw her again. The Commission,
with Stokes and the harbor-police who had manned the launch, carried the baggage (Martin weaving with a case of the phage) through the rutty
balconied streets to the San Marino Hotel.

Once or twice faces, disembodied things with frightened lips, stared at them from alley-mouths; and when they came to the hotel, when they stood
before it, a weary caravan laden with bags and boxes, the bulging-eyed manageress peered from a window before she would admit them.

As they entered, Martin saw under a street light the first stirring of life: a crying woman and a bewildered child following an open wagon in
which were heaped a dozen stiff bodies.

"And I might have saved all of them, with phage," he whispered to himself.

His forehead was cold, yet it was greasy with sweat as he babbled to the manageress of rooms and meals, as he prayed that Leora might not have
seen the Things in that slow creaking wagon.

"I'd have choked her before I let her come, if I'd known," he was shuddering.

The woman apologized, "I must ask you gentlemen to carry your things up to your rooms. Our boys-- They aren't here any more."

What became of the walking stick which, in such pleased vanity, Martin had bought in New York, he never knew. He was too busy guarding the cases
of phage, and worrying, "Maybe this stuff would save everybody."

Now Stokes of St. Swithin's was a reticent man and hard, but when they had the last bag upstairs, he leaned his head against a door, cried, "My
God, Arrowsmith, I'm so glad you've got here," and broke from them, running. . . . One of the Negro harbor-police, expressionless, speaking the
English of the Antilles with something of the accent of Piccadilly, said, "Sar, have you any other command for I? If you permit, we boys will now
go home. Sar, on the table is the whisky Dr. Stokes have told I to bring."

Martin stared. It was Sondelius who said. "Thank you very much, boys. Here's a quid between you. Now get some sleep."

They saluted and were not.

Sondelius made the novices as merry as he could for half an hour.

Martin and Leora woke to a broiling, flaring, green and crimson morning, yet ghastly still; awoke and realized that about them was a strange
land, as yet unseen, and before them the work that in distant New York had seemed dramatic and joyful and that stank now of the charnel house.


III


A sort of breakfast was brought to them by a Negress who, before she would enter, peeped fearfully at them from the door.

Sondelius rumbled in from his room, in an impassioned silk dressing-gown. If ever, spectacled and stooped, he had looked old, now he was young
and boisterous.

"Hey, ya, Slim, I think we get some work here! Let me at those rats! This Inchcape--to try to master them with strychnin! A noble melon! Leora,
when you divorce Martin, you marry me, heh? Give me the salt. Yey, I sleep fine!"

The night before, Martin had scarce looked at their room. Now he was diverted by what he considered its foreignness: the lofty walls of wood
painted a watery blue, the wide furnitureless spaces, the bougainvillaea at the window, and in the courtyard the merciless heat and rattling
metallic leaves of palmettoes.

Beyond the courtyard walls were the upper stories of a balconied Chinese shop and the violent-colored skylight of The Blue Bazaar.

He felt that there should be a clamor from this exotic world, but there was only a rebuking stillness, and even Sondelius became dumb, though he
had his moment. He waddled back to his room, dressed himself in surah silk last worn on the East Coast of Africa, and returned bringing a sun-
helmet which secretly he had bought for Martin.

In linen jacket and mushroom helmet, Martin belonged more to the tropics than to his own harsh Northern meadows.

But his pleasure in looking foreign was interrupted by the entrance of the Surgeon General, Dr. R. E. Inchcape Jones, lean but apple-cheeked,
worried and hasty.

"Of course you chaps are welcome, but really, with all we have to do I'm afraid we can't give you the attention you doubtless expect," he said
indignantly.

Martin sought for adequate answer. It was Sondelius who spoke of a non-existent cousin who was a Harley Street specialist, and who explained that
all they wanted was a laboratory for Martin and, for himself, a chance to slaughter rats. How many times, in how many lands, had Gustaf Sondelius
flattered pro-consuls and persuaded the heathen to let themselves be saved!

Under his hands the Surgeon General became practically human; he looked as though he really thought Leora was pretty; he promised that he might
perhaps let Sondelius tamper with his rats. He would return that afternoon and conduct them to the house prepared for them, Penrith Lodge, on the
safe secluded hills behind Blackwater. And (he bowed gallantly) he thought that Mrs. Arrowsmith would find the Lodge a topping bungalow, with
three rather decent servants. The butler, though a colored chap, was an old mess-sergeant.

Inchcape Jones had scarce gone when at the door there was a pounding and it opened on Martin's classmate at Winnemac, Dr. the Rev. Ira Hinkley.

Martin had forgotten Ira, that bulky Christian who had tried to save him during otherwise dulcet hours of dissection. He recalled him confusedly.
The man came in, vast and lumbering. His eyes were staring and altogether mad, and his voice was parched:

"Hello, Mart. Yump, it's old Ira. I'm in charge of all the chapels of the Sanctification Brotherhood here. Oh, Mart, if you only knew the
wickedness of the natives, and the way they lie and sing indecent songs and commit all manner of vileness! And the Church of England lets them
wallow in their sins! Only us to save them. I heard you were coming. I have been laboring, Mart. I've nursed the poor plague-stricken devils, and
I've told them how hellfire is roaring about them. Oh, Mart, if you knew how my heart bleeds to see these ignorant fellows going unrepentant to
eternal torture! After all these years I know you can't still be a scoffer. I come to you with open hands, begging you not merely to comfort the
sufferers but to snatch their souls from the burning lakes of sulfur to which, in His everlasting mercy, the Lord of Hosts hath condemned those
that blaspheme against His gospel, freely given--"

Again it was Sondelius who got Ira Hinkley out, not too discontented, while Martin could only sputter, "Now how do you suppose that maniac ever
got here? This is going to be awful!"

Before Inchcape Jones returned, the Commission ventured out for their first sight of the town. . . . A Scientific Commission, yet all the while
they were only boisterous Gustaf and doubtful Martin and casual Leora.

The citizens had been told that in bubonic plague, unlike pneumonic, there is no danger from direct contact with people developing the disease,
so long as vermin were kept away, but they did not believe it. They were afraid of one another, and the more afraid of strangers. The Commission
found a street dying with fear. House-shutters were closed, hot slatted patches in the sun; and the only traffic was an empty trolley-car with a
frightened motorman who peered down at them and sped up lest they come aboard. Grocery shops and drugstores were open, but from their shady
depths the shopkeepers looked out timidly, and when the Commission neared a fish-stall, the one customer fled, edging past them.

Once a woman, never explained, a woman with wild ungathered hair, ran by them shrieking, "My little boy--"

They came to the market, a hundred stalls under a long corrugated-iron roof, with stone pillars bearing the fatuous names of the commissioners
who had built it--by voting bonds for the building. It should have been buzzing with jovial buyers and sellers, but in all the gaudy booths there
were only one Negress with a row of twig besoms, one Hindu in gray rags squatting before his wealth of a dozen vegetables. The rest was
emptiness, and a litter of rotted potatoes and scudding papers.

Down a grim street of coal yards, they found a public square, and here was the stillness not of sleep but of ancient death.

The square was rimmed with the gloom of mango trees, which shut out the faint-hearted breeze and cooped in the heat--stale lifeless heat, in
whose misery the leering silence was the more dismaying. Through a break in the evil mangoes they beheld a plaster house hung with black crape.

"It's too hot to walk. Perhaps we'd better go back to the hotel," said Leora.


IV


In the afternoon Inchcape Jones appeared with a Ford, whose familiarity made it the more grotesque in this creepy world, and took them to Penrith
Lodge, on the cool hills behind Blackwater.

They traversed a packed native section of bamboo hovels and shops that were but unpainted, black-weathered huts, without doors, without windows,
from whose recesses dark faces looked at them resentfully. They passed, at their colored driver's most jerky speed, a new brick structure in
front of which stately Negro policemen with white gloves, white sun-helmets, and scarlet coats cut by white belts, marched with rifles at the
carry.

Inchcape Jones sighed, "Schoolhouse. Turned it into pest-house. Hundred cases in there. Die every hour. Have to guard it--patients get delirious
and try to escape."

After them trailed an odor of rotting.

Martin did not feel superior to humanity.


V


With broad porches and low roof, among bright flamboyants and the cheerful sago palms, the bungalow of Penrith Lodge lay high on a crest, looking
across the ugly flat of the town to the wash of sea. At its windows the reed jalousies whispered and clattered, and the high bare rooms were
enlivened by figured Carib scarfs. . . . It had belonged to the Port-doctor, dead these three days.

Inchcape Jones assured the doubtful Leora that she would nowhere else be so safe; the house was rat-proofed, and the doctor had caught the plague
at the pier, had died without ever coming back to this well-beloved bungalow in which he, the professional bachelor, had given the most clamorous
parties in St. Hubert.

Martin had with him sufficient equipment for a small laboratory, and he established it in a bedroom with gas and running water. Next to it was
his and Leora's bedroom, then an apartment which Sondelius immediately made homelike by dropping his clothes and his pipe ashes all over it.

There were two colored maids and an ex-soldier butler, who received them and unpacked their bags as though the plague did not exist.

Martin was perplexed by their first caller. He was a singularly handsome young Negro, quick-moving, intelligent of eye. Like most white
Americans, Martin had talked a great deal about the inferiority of Negroes and had learned nothing whatever about them. He looked questioning as
the young man observed:

"My name is Oliver Marchand."

"Yes?"

"Dr. Marchand--I have my M.D. from Howard."

"Oh."

"May I venture to welcome you, Doctor? And may I ask before I hurry off--I have three cases from official families isolated at the bottom of the
hill--oh, yes, in this crisis they permit a Negro doctor to practice even among the whites! But-- Dr. Stokes insists that D'Herelle and you are
right in calling bacteriophage an organism. But what about Bordet's contention that it's an enzyme?"

Then for half an hour did Dr. Arrowsmith and Dr. Marchand, forgetting the plague, forgetting the more cruel plague of race-fear, draw diagrams.

Marchand sighed, "I must go, Doctor. May I help you in any way I can? It is a great privilege to know you."

He saluted quietly and was gone, a beautiful young animal. "I never thought a Negro doctor-- I wish people wouldn't keep showing me how much I
don't know!" said Martin.


VI


While Martin prepared his laboratory, Sondelius was joyfully at work, finding out what was wrong with Inchcape Jones's administration, which
proved to be almost anything that could be wrong.

A plague epidemic today, in a civilized land, is no longer an affair of people dying in the streets and of drivers shouting "Bring out your
dead." The fight against it is conducted like modern warfare, with telephones instead of foaming chargers. The ancient horror bears a face of
efficiency. There are offices, card indices, bacteriological examinations of patients and of rats. There is, or should be, a lone director with
superlegal powers. There are large funds, education of the public by placard and newspaper, brigades of rat-killers, a corps of disinfectors,
isolation of patients lest vermin carry the germs from them to others.

In most of these particulars Inchcape Jones had failed. To have the existence of the plague admitted in the first place, he had had to fight the
merchants controlling the House of Assembly, who had howled that a quarantine would ruin them, and who now refused to give him complete power and
tried to manage the epidemic with a Board of Health, which was somewhat worse than navigating a ship during a typhoon by means of a committee.

Inchcape Jones was courageous enough, but he could not cajole people. The newspapers called him a tyrant, would not help win over the public to
take precautions against rats and ground squirrels. He had tried to fumigate a few warehouses with sulfur dioxid, but the owners complained that
the fumes stained fabrics and paint; and the Board of Health bade him wait--wait a little while--wait and see. He had tried to have the rats
examined, to discover what were the centers of infection, but his only bacteriologists were the overworked Stokes and Oliver Marchand; and
Inchcape Jones had often explained, at nice dinner-parties, that he did not trust the intelligence of Negroes.

He was nearly insane; he worked twenty hours a day; he assured himself that he was not afraid; he reminded himself that he had an honestly won
D.S.O.; he longed to have someone besides a board of Red Leg merchants give him orders; and always in the blur of his sleepless brain he saw the
hills of Surrey, his sisters in the rose-walk, and the basket-chairs and tea-table beside his father's tennis-lawn.

Then Sondelius, that crafty and often lying lobbyist, that unmoral soldier of the Lord, burst in and became dictator.

He terrified the Board of Health. He quoted his own experiences in Mongolia and India. He assured them that if they did not cease being
politicians, the plague might cling in St. Hubert forever, so that they would no more have the amiable dollars of the tourists and the pleasures
of smuggling.

He threatened and flattered, and told a story which they had never heard, even at the Ice House; and he had Inchcape Jones appointed dictator of
St. Hubert.

Gustaf Sondelius stood extremely close behind the dictator.

He immediately started rat-killing. On a warrant signed by Inchcape Jones, he arrested the owner of a warehouse who had declared that he was not
going to have HIS piles of cocoa ruined. He marched his policemen, stout black fellows trained in the Great War, to the warehouse, set them on
guard, and pumped in hydrocyanic acid gas.

The crowd gathered beyond the police line, wondering, doubting. They could not believe that anything was happening, for the cracks in the
warehouse walls had been adequately stuffed and there was no scent of gas. But the roof was leaky. The gas crept up through it, colorless,
diabolic, and suddenly a buzzard circling above the roof tilted forward, fell slantwise, and lay dead among the watchers.

A man picked it up, goggling.

"Dead, right enough," everybody muttered. They looked at Sondelius, parading among his soldiers, with reverence.

His rat-crew searched each warehouse before pumping in the gas, lest someone be left in the place, but in the third one a tramp had been asleep,
and when the doors were anxiously opened after the fumigation, there were not only thousands of dead rats but also a dead and very stiff tramp.

"Poor fella--bury him," said Sondelius.

There was no inquest.

Over a rum swizzle at the Ice House, Sondelius reflected, "I wonder how many men I murder, Martin? When I was disinfecting ships at Antofagasta,
always afterward we find two or three stowaways. They hide too good. Poor fellas."

Sondelius arbitrarily dragged bookkeepers and porters from their work, to pursue the rats with poison, traps, and gas, or to starve them by
concreting and screening stables and warehouses. He made a violent red and green rat map of the town. He broke every law of property by raiding
shops for supplies. He alternately bullied and caressed the leaders of the House of Assembly. He called on Kellett, told stories to his children,
and almost wept as he explained what a good Lutheran he was--and consistently (but not at Kellett's) he drank too much.

The Ice House, that dimmest and most peaceful among saloons, with its cool marble tables, its gilt-touched white walls, had not been closed,
though only the oldest topers and the youngest bravos, fresh out from Home and agonizingly lonely for Peckham or Walthamstow, for Peel Park or
the Cirencester High Street, were desperate enough to go there, and of the attendants there remained only one big Jamaica barman. By chance he
was among them all the most divine mixer of the planter's punch, the New Orleans fizz, and the rum swizzle. His masterpieces Sondelius acclaimed,
he alone placid among the scary patrons who came in now not to dream but to gulp and flee. After a day of slaughtering rats and disinfecting
houses he sat with Martin, with Martin and Leora, or with whomever he could persuade to linger.

To Gustaf Sondelius, dukes and cobblers were alike remarkable, and Martin was sometimes jealous when he saw Sondelius turning to a cocoa-broker's
clerk with the same smile he gave to Martin. For hours Sondelius talked, of Shanghai and epistemology and the painting of Nevinson; for hours he
sang scurrilous lyrics of the Quarter, and boomed, "Yey, how I kill the rats at Kellett's wharf today! I don't t'ink one little swizzle would
break down too many glomeruli in an honest man's kidneys."

He was cheerful, but never with the reproving and infuriating cheerfulness of an Ira Hinkley. He mocked himself, Martin, Leora, and their work.
At home dinner he never cared what he ate (though he did care what he drank), which at Penrith Lodge was desirable, in view of Leora's efforts to
combine the views of Wheatsylvania with the standards of West Indian servants and the absence of daily deliveries. He shouted and sang--and took
precautions for working among rats and the agile fleas: the high boots, the strapped wrists, and the rubber neck-band which he had invented and
which is known in every tropical supply shop today as the Sondelius Anti-vermin Neck Protector.

It happened that he was, without Martin or Gottlieb ever understanding it, the most brilliant as well as the least pompous and therefore least
appreciated warrior against epidemics that the world has known.

Thus with Sondelius, though for Martin there were as yet but embarrassment and futility and the fear of fear.




Chapter 34



To persuade the shopkeeping lords of St. Hubert to endure a test in which half of them might die, so that all plague might--perhaps--be ended
forever, was impossible. Martin argued with Inchcape Jones, with Sondelius, but he had no favor, and he began to meditate a political campaign as
he would have meditated an experiment.

He had seen the suffering of the plague and he had (though he still resisted) been tempted to forget experimentation, to give up the possible
saving of millions for the immediate saving of thousands. Inchcape Jones, a little rested now under Sondelius's padded bullying and able to slip
into a sane routine, drove Martin to the village of Carib, which, because of its pest of infected ground squirrels, was proportionately worse
smitten than Blackwater.

They sped out of the capital by white shell roads agonizing to the sun-poisoned eyes; they left the dusty shanties of suburban Yamtown for a land
cool with bamboo groves and palmettoes, thick with sugar-cane. From a hilltop they swung down a curving road to a beach where the high surf
boomed in limestone caves. It seemed impossible that this joyous shore could be threatened by plague, the slimy creature of dark alleys.

The motor cut through a singing trade wind which told of clean sails and disdainful men. They darted on where the foam feathers below Point Carib
and where, round that lone royal palm on the headland, the bright wind hums. They slipped into a hot valley, and came to the village of Carib and
to creeping horror.

The plague had been dismaying in Blackwater; in Carib it was the end of all things. The rat-fleas had found fat homes in the ground squirrels
which burrowed in every garden about the village. In Blackwater there had from the first been isolation of the sick, but in Carib death was in
every house, and the village was surrounded by soldier police, with bayonets, who let no one come or go save the doctors.

Martin was guided down the stinking street of cottages palm-thatched and walled with cow-dung plaster on bamboo laths, cottages shared by the
roosters and the goats. He heard men shrieking in delirium; a dozen times he saw that face of terror--sunken bloody eyes, drawn face, open mouth-
-which marks the Black Death; and once he beheld an exquisite girl child in coma on the edge of death, her tongue black and round her the scent
of the tomb.

They fled away, to Point Carib and the trade wind, and when Inchcape Jones demanded, "After that sort of thing, can you really talk of
experimenting?" then Martin shook his head, while he tried to recall the vision of Gottlieb and all their little plans: "half to get the phage,
half to be sternly deprived."

It came to him that Gottlieb, in his secluded innocence, had not realized what it meant to gain leave to experiment amid the hysteria of an
epidemic.

He went to the Ice House; he had a drink with a frightened clerk from Derbyshire; he regained the picture of Gottlieb's sunken, demanding eyes;
and he swore that he would not yield to a compassion which in the end would make all compassion futile.

Since Inchcape Jones could not understand the need of experimentation, he would call on the Governor, Colonel Sir Robert Fairlamb.


II


Though Government House was officially the chief residence of St. Hubert, it was but a thatched bungalow a little larger than Martin's own
Penrith Lodge. When he saw it, Martin felt more easy, and he ambled up to the broad steps, at nine of the evening, as though he were dropping in
to call on a neighbor in Wheatsylvania.

He was stopped by a Jamaican man-servant of appalling courtesy.

He snorted that he was Dr. Arrowsmith, head of the McGurk Commission, and he was sorry but he must see Sir Robert at once.

The servant was suggesting, in his blandest and most annoying manner, that really Dr. Uh would do better to see the Surgeon General, when a broad
red face and a broad red voice projected themselves over the veranda railing, with a rumble of, "Send him up, Jackson, and don't be a fool!"

Sir Robert and Lady Fairlamb were finishing dinner on the veranda, at a small round table littered with coffee and liqueurs and starred with
candles. She was a slight, nervous insignificance; he was rather puffy, very flushed, undoubtedly courageous, and altogether dismayed; and at a
time when no laundress dared go anywhere, his evening shirt was luminous.

Martin was in his now beloved linen suit, with a crumply soft shirt which Leora had been meanin' to wash.

Martin explained what he wanted to do--what he must do, if the world was ever to get over the absurdity of having plague.

Sir Robert listened so agreeably that Martin thought he understood, but at the end he bellowed:

"Young man, if I were commanding a division at the front, with a dud show, an awful show, going on, and a War Office clerk asked me to risk the
whole thing to try out some precious little invention of his own, can you imagine what I'd answer? There isn't much I can do now--these doctor
Johnnies have taken everything out of my hands--but as far as possible I shall certainly prevent you Yankee vivisectionists from coming in and
using us as a lot of sanguinary--sorry, Evelyn--sanguinary corpses. Good night, sir!"


III


Thanks to Sondelius's crafty bullying, Martin was able to present his plan to a Special Board composed of the Governor, the temporarily suspended
Board of Health, Inchcape Jones, several hearty members of the House of Assembly, and Sondelius himself, attending in the unofficial capacity
which all over the world he had found useful for masking a cheerful tyranny. Sondelius even brought in the Negro doctor, Oliver Marchand, not on
the ground that he was the most intelligent person on the island (which happened to be Sondelius's reason) but because he "represented the
plantation hands."

Sondelius himself was as much opposed to Martin's unemotional experiments as was Fairlamb; he believed that all experiments should be, by devices
not entirely clear to him, carried on in the laboratory without disturbing the conduct of agreeable epidemics, but he could never resist a drama
like the innocent meeting of the Special Board.

The meeting was set for a week ahead . . . with scores dying every day. While he waited for it Martin manufactured more phage and helped
Sondelius murder rats, and Leora listened to the midnight debates of the two men and tried to make them acknowledge that it had been wise to let
her come. Inchcape Jones offered to Martin the position of Government bacteriologist, but he refused lest he be sidetracked.

The Special Board met in Parliament House, all of them trying to look not like their simple and domestic selves but like judges. With them
appeared such doctors of the island as could find the time.

While Leora listened from the back of the room, Martin addressed them, not unaware of the spectacle of little Mart Arrowsmith of Elk Mills taken
seriously by the rulers of a tropic isle headed by a Sir Somebody. Beside him stood Max Gottlieb, and in Gottlieb's power he reverently sought to
explain that mankind has ever given up eventual greatness because some crisis, some war or election or loyalty to a Messiah which at the moment
seemed weighty, has choked the patient search for truth. He sought to explain that he could--perhaps--save half of a given district, but that to
test for all time the value of phage, the other half must be left without it . . . though, he craftily told them, in any case the luckless half
would receive as much care as at present.

Most of the Board had heard that he possessed a magic cure for the plague which for unknown and probably discreditable reasons, he was
withholding, and they were not going to have it withheld. There was a great deal of discussion rather unconnected with what he had said, and out
of it came only the fact that everybody except Stokes and Oliver Marchand was against him; Kellett was angry with this American, Sir Robert
Fairlamb was beefily disapproving, and Sondelius admitted that though Martin was quite a decent young man, he was a fanatic.

Into their argument plunged a fury in the person of Ira Hinkley, missionary of the Sanctification Brotherhood.

Martin had not seen him since the first morning in Blackwater. He gaped as he heard Ira pleading:

"Gentlemen, I know almost the whole bunch of you are Church of England, but I beg you to listen to me, not as a minister but as a qualified
doctor of medicine. Oh, the wrath of God is upon you--But I mean: I was a classmate of Arrowsmith in the States. I'm onto him! He was such a
failure that he was suspended from medical school. A scientist! And his boss, this fellow Gottlieb, he was fired from the University of Winnemac
for incompetence! I know 'em! Liars and fools! Scorners of righteousness! Has anybody but Arrowsmith himself told you he's a qualified
scientist?"

The face of Sondelius changed from curiosity to stolid Scandinavian wrath. He arose and shouted:

"Sir Robert, this man is crazy! Dr. Gottlieb is one of the seven distinguished living scientists, and Dr. Arrowsmith is his representative! I
announce my agreement with him, complete. As you must have seen from my work, I'm perfectly independent of him and entirely at your service, but
I know his standing and I follow him, quite humbly."

The Special Board coaxed Ira Hinkley out, for the meanest of reasons--in St. Hubert the whites do not greatly esteem the holy ecstasies of
Negroes in the Sanctification Brotherhood chapels--but they voted only to "give the matter their consideration," while still men died by the
score each day, and in Manchuria as in St. Hubert they prayed for rest from the ancient clawing pain.

Outside, as the Special Board trudged away, Sondelius blared at Martin and the indignant Leora, "Yey, a fine fight!"

Martin answered, "Gustaf, you've joined me now. The first darn' thing you do, you come have a shot of phage."

"No. Slim, I said I will not have your phage till you give it to everybody. I mean it, no matter how much I make fools of your Board."

As they stood before Parliament House, a small motor possessing everything but comfort and power staggered up to them, and from it vaulted a man
lean as Gottlieb and English as Inchcape Jones.

"You Dr. Arrowsmith? My name is Twyford, Cecil Twyford of St. Swithin's Parish. Tried to get here for the Special Board meeting, but my beastly
foreman had to take the afternoon off and die of plague. Stokes has told me your plans. Quite right. All nonsense to go on having plague. Board
refused? Sorry. Perhaps we can do something in St. Swithin's. Goo' day."

All evening Martin and Sondelius were full of language. Martin went to bed longing for the regularity of working all night and foraging for
cigarettes at dawn. He could not sleep, because an imaginary Ira Hinkley was always bursting in on him.

Four days later he heard that Ira was dead.

Till he had sunk in coma, Ira had nursed and blessed his people, the humble colored congregation in the hot tin chapel which he had now turned
into a pest-house. He staggered from cot to cot, under the gospel texts he had lettered on the whitewashed wall, then he cried once, loudly, and
dropped by the pine pulpit where he had joyed to preach.


IV


One chance Martin did have. In Carib, where every third man was down with plague and one doctor to attend them all, he now gave phage to the
entire village; a long strain of injections, not improved by the knowledge that one jaunty flea from any patient might bring him the plague.

The tedium of dread was forgotten when he began to find and make precise notes of a slackening of the epidemic, which was occurring nowhere
except here at Carib.

He came home raving to Leora, "I'll show 'em! Now they'll let me try test conditions, and then when the epidemic's over we'll hustle home. It'll
be lovely to be cold again! Wonder if Holabird and Sholtheis are any more friendly now? Be pretty good to see the little ole flat, eh?"

"Yes, won't it!" said Leora. "I wish I'd thought to have the kitchen painted while we're away. . . . I think I'll put that blue chair in the
bedroom."

Though there was a decrease in the Plague at Carib, Sondelius was worried, because it was the worst center for infected ground squirrels on the
island. He made decisions quickly. One evening he explained certain things to Inchcape Jones and Martin, rode down their doubts, and snorted:

"Only way to disinfect that place is to burn it--burn th' whole thing. Have it done by morning, before anybody can stop us."

With Martin as his lieutenant he marshaled his troop of rat-catchers--ruffians all of them, with high boots, tied jacket sleeves, and ebon
visages of piracy. They stole food from shops, tents and blankets and camp-stoves from the Government military warehouse, and jammed their booty
into motor trucks. The line of trucks roared down to Carib, the rat-catchers sitting atop, singing pious hymns.

They charged on the village, drove out the healthy, carried the sick on litters, settled them all in tents in a pasture up the valley, and after
midnight they burned the town.

The troops ran among the huts, setting them alight with fantastic torches. The palm thatch sent up thick smoke, dead sluggish white with currents
of ghastly black through which broke sudden flames. Against the glare the palmettoes were silhouetted. The solid-seeming huts were instantly
changed into thin bamboo frameworks, thin lines of black slats, with the thatch falling in sparks. The flame lighted the whole valley; roused the
terrified squawking birds, and turned the surf at Point Carib to bloody foam.

With such of the natives as had strength enough and sense enough, Sondelius's troops made a ring about the burning village, shouting insanely as
they clubbed the fleeing rats and ground squirrels. In the flare of devastation Sondelius was a fiend, smashing the bewildered rats with a club,
shooting at them as they fled, and singing to himself all the while the obscene chantey of Bill the Sailor. But at dawn he was nursing the sick
in the bright new canvas village, showing mammies how to use their camp-stoves, and in a benevolent way discussing methods of poisoning ground
squirrels in their burrows.

Sondelius returned to Blackwater, but Martin remained in the tent village for two days, giving them the phage, making notes, directing the
amateur nurses. He returned to Blackwater one mid-afternoon and sought the office of the Surgeon General, or what had been the office of the
Surgeon General till Sondelius had come and taken it away from him.

Sondelius was there, at Inchcape Jones's desk, but for once he was not busy. He was sunk in his chair, his eyes bloodshot.

"Yey! We had a fine time with the rats at Carib, eh? How is my new tent willage?" he chuckled, but his voice was weak, and as he rose he
staggered.

"What is it? What is it?"

"I t'ink-- It's got me. Some flea got me. Yes," in a shaky but extremely interested manner, "I was yoost thinking I will go and quarantine
myself. I have fever all right, and adenitis. My strength-- Huh! I am almost sixty, but the way I can lift weights that no sailor can touch-- And
I could fight five rounds! Oh, my God, Martin, I am so weak! Not scared! No!"

But for Martin's arms he would have collapsed.

He refused to return to Penrith Lodge and Leora's nursing. "I who have isolated so many--it is my turn," he said.

Martin and Inchcape Jones found for Sondelius a meager clean cottage--the family had died there, all of them, but it had been fumigated. They
procured a nurse and Martin himself attended the sick man, trying to remember that once he had been a doctor, who understood ice-bags and
consolation. One thing was not to be had--mosquito netting--and only of this did Sondelius complain.

Martin bent over him, agonized to see how burning was his skin, how swollen his face and his tongue, how weak his voice as he babbled:

"Gottlieb is right about these jests of God. Yey! His best one is the tropics. God planned them so beautiful, flowers and sea and mountains. He
made the fruit to grow so well that man need not work--and then He laughed, and stuck in volcanoes and snakes and damp heat and early senility
and the plague and malaria. But the nastiest trick He ever played on man was inventing the flea."

His bloated lips widened, from his hot throat oozed a feeble croaking, and Martin realized that he was trying to laugh.

He became delirious, but between spasms he muttered, with infinite pain, tears in his eyes at his own weakness:

"I want you to see how an agnostic can die!

"I am not afraid, but yoost once more I would like to see Stockholm, and Fifth Avenue on the day the first snow falls and Holy Week at Sevilla.
And one good last drunk! I am very peaceful, Slim. It hurts some, but life was a good game. And--I am a pious agnostic. Oh, Martin, give my
people the phage! Save all of them-- God, I did not think they could hurt me so!"

His heart had failed. He was still on his low cot.


V


Martin had an unhappy pride that, with all his love for Gustaf Sondelius, he could still keep his head, still resist Inchcape Jones's demand that
he give the phage to everyone, still do what he had been sent to do.

"I'm not a sentimentalist; I'm a scientist!" he boasted.

They snarled at him in the streets now; small boys called him names and threw stones. They had heard that he was willfully withholding their
salvation. The citizens came in Committees to beg him to heal their children, and he was so shaken that he had ever to keep before him the vision
of Gottlieb.

The panic was increasing. They who had at first kept cool could not endure the strain of wakening at night to see upon their windows the glow of
the pile of logs on Admiral Knob, the emergency crematory where Gustaf Sondelius and his curly gray mop had been shoveled into the fire along
with a crippled Negro boy and a Hindu beggar.

Sir Robert Fairlamb was a blundering hero, exasperating the sick while he tried to nurse them; Stokes remained the Rock of Ages--he had only
three hours' sleep a night, but he never failed to take his accustomed fifteen minutes of exercise when he awoke; and Leora was busy in Penrith
Lodge, helping Martin prepare phage.

It was the Surgeon General who went to pieces.

Robbed of his dependence on the despised Sondelius, sunk again in a mad planlessness, Inchcape Jones shrieked when he thought he was speaking
low, and the cigarette which was ever in his thin hand shook so that the smoke quivered up in trembling spirals.

Making his tour, he came at night on a sloop by which a dozen Red Legs were escaping to Barbados, and suddenly he was among them, bribing them to
take him along.

As the sloop stood out from Blackwater Harbor he stretched his arms toward his sisters and the peace of the Surrey hills, but as the few
frightened lights of the town were lost, he realized that he was a coward and came up out of his madness, with his lean head high.

He demanded that they turn the sloop and take him back. They refused, howling at him, and locked him in the cabin. They were becalmed; it was two
days before they reached Barbados, and by then the world would know that he had deserted.

Altogether expressionless, Inchcape Jones tramped from the sloop to a waterfront hotel in Barbados, and stood for a long time in a slatternly
room smelling of slop-pails. He would never see his sisters and the cool hills. With the revolver which he had carried to drive terrified
patients back into the isolation wards, with the revolver which he had carried at Arras, he killed himself.


VI


Thus Martin came to his experiment. Stokes was appointed Surgeon General, vice Inchcape Jones, and he made an illegal assignment of Martin to St.
Swithin's Parish, as medical officer with complete power. This, and the concurrence of Cecil Twyford, made his experiment possible.

He was invited to stay at Twyford's. His only trouble was the guarding of Leora. He did not know what he would encounter in St. Swithin's, while
Penrith Lodge was as safe as any place on the island. When Leora insisted that, during his experiment, the cold thing which had stilled the
laughter of Sondelius might come to him and he might need her, he tried to satisfy her by promising that if there was a place for her in St.
Swithin's, he would send for her.

Naturally, he was lying.

"Hard enough to see Gustaf go. By thunder she's not going to run risks!" he vowed.

He left her, protected by the maids and the soldier butler, with Dr. Oliver Marchand to look in when he could.


VII


In St. Swithin's Parish the cocoa and bamboo groves and sharp hills of southern St. Hubert gave way to unbroken cane-fields. Here Cecil Twyford,
that lean abrupt man, ruled every acre and interpreted every law.

His place, Frangipani Court, was a refuge from the hot humming plain. The house was old and low, of thick stone and plaster walls; the paneled
rooms were lined with the china, the portraits, and the swords of Twyfords for three hundred years; and between the wings was a walled garden
dazzling with hibiscus.

Twyford led Martin through the low cool hall and introduced him to five great sons and to his mother, who, since his wife's death, ten years ago,
had been mistress of the house.

"Have tea?" said Twyford. "Our American guest will be down in a moment."

He would not have thought of saying it, but he had sworn that since for generations Twyfords had drunk tea here at a seemly hour, no panic should
prevent their going on drinking it at that hour.

When Martin came into the garden, when he saw the old silver on the wicker table and heard the quiet voices, the plague seemed conquered, and he
realized that, four thousand miles southwest of the Lizard, he was in England.

They were seated, pleasant but not too comfortable, when the American guest came down and from the door stared at Martin as strangely as he
stared in turn.

He beheld a woman who must be his sister. She was perhaps thirty to his thirty-seven, but in her slenderness, her paleness, her black brows and
dusky hair, she was his twin; she was his self enchanted.

He could hear his voice croaking, "But you're my sister!" and she opened her lips, yet neither of them spoke as they bowed at introduction. When
she sat down, Martin had never been so conscious of a woman's presence.

He learned, before evening, that she was Joyce Lanyon, widow of Roger Lanyon of New York. She had come to St. Hubert to see her plantations and
had been trapped by the quarantine. He had tentatively heard of her dead husband as a young man of wealth and family; he seemed to remember
having seen in Vanity Fair a picture of the Lanyons at Palm Beach.

She talked only of the weather, the flowers, but there was a rising gaiety in her which stirred even the dour Cecil Twyford. In the midst of her
debonair insults to the hugest of the huge sons, Martin turned on her:

"You ARE my sister!"

"Obviously. Well, since you're a scientist-- Are you a good scientist?"

"Pretty good."

"I've met your Mrs. McGurk. And Dr. Rippleton Holabird. Met 'em in Hessian Hook. You know it, don't you?"

"No, I-- Oh, I've heard of it."

"You know. It's that renovated old part of Brooklyn where writers and economists and all those people, some of them almost as good as the very
best, consort with people who are almost as smart as the very smartest. You know. Where they dress for dinner but all of them have heard about
James Joyce. Dr. Holabird is frightfully charming, don't you think?"

"Why--"

"Tell me. I really mean it. Cecil has been explaining what you plan to do experimentally. Could I help you--nursing or cooking or something--or
would I merely be in the way?"

"I don't know yet. If I can use you, I'll be unscrupulous enough!"

"Oh, don't be earnest like Cecil here, and Dr. Stokes! They have no sense of play. Do you like that man Stokes? Cecil adores him, and I suppose
he's simply infested with virtues, but I find him so dry and thin and unappetizing. Don't you think he might be a little gayer?"

Martin gave up all chance of knowing her as he hurled:

"Look here! You said you found Holabird 'charming.' It makes me tired to have you fall for his scientific tripe and not appreciate Stokes. Stokes
is hard--thank God!--and probably he's rude. Why not? He's fighting a world that bellows for fake charm. No scientist can go through his grind
and not come out more or less rude. And I tell you Stokes was born a researcher. I wish we had him at McGurk. Rude? Wish you could hear him being
rude to me!"

Twyford looked doubtful, his mother looked delicately shocked, and the five sons beefily looked nothing at all, while Martin raged on, trying to
convey his vision of the barbarian, the ascetic, the contemptuous acolyte of science. But Joyce Lanyon's lovely eyes were kind, and when she
spoke she had lost something of her too-cosmopolitan manner of a diner-out:

"Yes. I suppose it's the difference between me, playing at being a planter, and Cecil."

After dinner he walked with her in the garden and sought to defend himself against he was not quite sure what, till she hinted:

"My dear man, you're so apologetic about never being apologetic! If you really must be my twin brother, do me the honor of telling me to go to
the devil whenever you want to. I don't mind. Now about your Gottlieb, who seems to be so much of an obsession with you--"

"Obsession! Rats! He--"

They parted an hour after.

Least of all things Martin desired such another peeping, puerile, irritable restlessness as he had shared with Orchid Pickerbaugh, but as he went
to bed in a room with old prints and a four-poster, it was disturbing to know that somewhere near him was Joyce Lanyon.

He sat up, aghast with truth. Was he going to fall in love with this desirable and quite useless young woman? (How lovely her shoulders, above
black satin at dinner! She had a genius of radiant flesh; it made that of most women, even the fragile Leora, seem coarse and thick. There was a
rosy glow behind it, as from an inner light.)

Did he really want Leora here, with Joyce Lanyon in the house? (Dear Leora, who was the source of life! Was she now, off there in Penrith Lodge,
missing him, lying awake for him?)

How could he, even in the crisis of an epidemic, invite the formal Twyfords to invite Leora? (How honest was he? That afternoon he had recognized
the rigid though kindly code of the Twyfords, but could he not set it aside by being frankly an Outlander?)

Suddenly he was out of bed, kneeling, praying to Leora.




Chapter 35



The plague had only begun to invade St. Swithin's, but it was unquestionably coming, and Martin, with his power as official medical officer of
the parish, was able to make plans. He divided the population into two equal parts. One of them, driven in by Twyford, was injected with plague
phage, the other half was left without.

He began to succeed. He saw far-off India, with its annual four hundred thousand deaths from plague, saved by his efforts. He heard Max Gottlieb
saying, "Martin, you haf done your experiment. I am very glat!"

The pest attacked the unphaged half of the parish much more heavily than those who had been treated. There did appear a case or two among those
who had the phage, but among the others there were ten, then twenty, then thirty daily victims. These unfortunate cases he treated, giving the
phage to alternate patients, in the somewhat barren almshouse of the parish, a whitewashed cabin the meaner against its vaulting background of
banyans and breadfruit trees.

He could never understand Cecil Twyford. Though Twyford had considered his hands as slaves, though he had, in his great barony, given them only
this barren almshouse, yet he risked his life now in nursing them, and the lives of all his sons.

Despite Martin's discouragement, Mrs. Lanyon came down to cook, and a remarkably good cook she was. She also made beds; she showed more
intelligence than the Twyford men about disinfecting herself; and as she bustled about the rusty kitchen, in a gingham gown she had borrowed from
a maid, she so disturbed Martin that he forgot to be gruff.


II


In the evening, while they returned by Twyford's rattling little motor to Frangipani Court, Mrs. Lanyon talked to Martin as one who had shared
his work, but when she had bathed and powdered and dressed, he talked to her as one who was afraid of her. Their bond was their resemblance as
brother and sister. They decided, almost irritably, that they looked utterly alike, except that her hair was more patent-leather than his and she
lacked his impertinent, cocking eyebrow.

Often Martin returned to his patients at night, but once or twice Mrs. Lanyon and he fled, as much from the family stolidity of the Twyfords as
from the thought of fever-scorched patients, to the shore of a rocky lagoon which cut far in from the sea.

They sat on a cliff, full of the sound of the healing tide. His brain was hectic with the memory of charts on the whitewashed broad planks, of
the almshouse, the sun cracks in the wall, the puffy terrified faces of black patients, how one of the Twyford sons had knocked over an ampule of
phage, and how itchingly hot it had been in the ward. But to his intensity the lagoon breeze was cooling, and cooling the rustling tide. He
perceived that Mrs. Lanyon's white frock was fluttering about her knees; he realized that she too was strained and still. He turned somberly
toward her, and she cried:

"I'm so frightened and so lonely! The Twyfords are heroic, but they're stone. I'm so marooned!"

He kissed her, and she rested against his shoulder. The softness of her sleeve was agitating to his hand. But she broke away with:

"No! You don't really care a hang about me. Just curious. Perhaps that's a good thing for me--tonight."

He tried to assure her, to assure himself, that he did care with peculiar violence, but languor was over him; between him and her fragrance were
the hospital cots, a great weariness, and the still face of Leora. They were silent together, and when his hand crept to hers they sat
unimpassioned, comprehending, free to talk of what they would.

He stood outside her door, when they had returned to the house, and imagined her soft moving within.

"No," he raged. "Can't do it. Joyce--women like her--one of the million things I've given up for work and for Lee. Well. That's all there is to
it then. But if I were here two weeks-- Fool! She'd be furious if you knocked! But--"

He was aware of the dagger of light under her door; the more aware of it as he turned his back and tramped to his room.


III


The telephone service in St. Hubert was the clumsiest feature of the island. There was no telephone at Penrith Lodge--the port-doctor had
cheerfully been wont to get his calls through a neighbor. The central was now demoralized by the plague, and when for two hours Martin had tried
to have Leora summoned, he gave up.

But he had triumphed. In three or four days he would drive to Penrith Lodge. Twyford had blankly assented to his suggestion that Leora be invited
hither, and if she and Joyce Lanyon should become such friends that Joyce would never again turn to him in loneliness, he was willing, he was
eager--he was almost eager.


IV


When Martin left her at the Lodge, in the leafy gloom high on the Penrith Hills, Leora felt his absence. They had been so little apart since he
had first come on her, scrubbing a hospital room in Zenith.

The afternoon was unending; each time she heard a creaking she roused with the hope that it was his step, and realized that he would not be
coming, all the blank evening, the terrifying night; would not be here anywhere, not his voice nor the touch of his hand.

Dinner was mournful. Often enough she had dined alone when Martin was at the Institute, but then he had been returning to her some time before
dawn--probably--and she had reflectively munched a snack on the corner of the kitchen table, looking at the funnies in the evening paper. Tonight
she had to live up to the butler, who served her as though she were a dinner-party of twenty.

She sat on the porch, staring at the shadowy roofs of Blackwater below, sure that she felt a "miasm" writhing up through the hot darkness.

She knew the direction of St. Swithin's Parish--beyond that delicate glimmer of lights from palm huts coiling up the hills. She concentrated on
it, wondering if by some magic she might not have a signal from him, but she could get no feeling of his looking toward her. She sat long and
quiet. . . . She had nothing to do.

Her night was sleepless. She tried to read in bed, by an electric globe inside the misty little tent of the mosquito-netting, but there was a
tear in the netting and the mosquitoes crept through. As she turned out the light and lay tense, unable to give herself over to sleep, unable to
sink into security, while to her blurred eyes the half-seen folds of the mosquito netting seemed to slide about her, she tried to remember
whether these mosquitoes might be carrying plague germs. She realized how much she had depended on Martin for such bits of knowledge, as for all
philosophy. She recalled how annoyed he had been because she could not remember whether the yellow fever mosquito was Anopheles or Stegomyia--or
was it Aedes?--and suddenly she laughed in the night.

She was reminded that he had told her to give herself another injection of phage.

"Hang it, I forgot. Well, I must be sure to do that tomorrow.

"Do that t'morrow--do that t'morrow," buzzed in her brain, an irritating inescapable refrain, while she was suspended over sleep, conscious of
how much she wanted to creep into his arms.

Next morning (and she did not remember to give herself another injection) the servants seemed twitchy, and her effort to comfort them brought out
the news that Oliver Marchand, the doctor on whom they depended, was dead.

In the afternoon the butler heard that his sister had been taken off to the isolation ward, and he went down to Blackwater to make arrangements
for his nieces. He did not return; no one ever learned what had become of him.

Toward dusk, when Leora felt as though a skirmish line were closing in on her, she fled into Martin's laboratory. It seemed filled with his jerky
brimming presence. She kept away from the flasks of plague germs, but she picked up, because it was his, a half-smoked cigarette and lighted it.

Now there was a slight crack in her lips; and that morning, fumbling at dusting--here in the laboratory meant as a fortress against disease--a
maid had knocked over a test-tube, which had trickled. The cigarette seemed dry enough, but in it there were enough plague germs to kill a
regiment.

Two nights after, when she was so desperately lonely that she thought of walking to Blackwater, finding a motor, and fleeing to Martin, she woke
with a fever, a headache, her limbs chilly. When the maids discovered her in the morning, they fled from the house. While lassitude flowed round
her, she was left alone in the isolated house, with no telephone.

All day, all night, as her throat crackled with thirst, she lay longing for someone to help her. Once she crawled to the kitchen for water. The
floor of the bedroom was an endless heaving sea, the hall a writhing dimness, and by the kitchen door she dropped and lay for an hour,
whimpering.

"Got to--got to--can't remember what it was," her voice kept appealing to her cloudy brain.

Aching, fighting the ache, she struggled up, wrapped about her a shabby cloak which one of the maids had abandoned in flight, and in the darkness
staggered out to find help. As she came to the highway she stumbled, and lay under the hedge, unmoving, like a hurt animal. On hands and knees
she crawled back into the Lodge, and between times, as her brain went dark, she nearly forgot the pain in her longing for Martin.

She was bewildered; she was lonely; she dared not start on her long journey without his hand to comfort her. She listened for him--listened--
tense with listening.

"You will come! I know you'll come and help me! I know. You'll come! Martin! Sandy! SANDY!" she sobbed.

Then she slipped down into the kindly coma. There was no more pain, and all the shadowy house was quiet but for her hoarse and struggling breath.


V


Like Sondelius, Joyce Lanyon tried to persuade Martin to give the phage to everybody.

"I'm getting to be good and stern, with all you people after me. Regular Gottlieb. Nothing can make me do it, not if they tried to lynch me," he
boasted.

He had explained Leora to Joyce.

"I don't know whether you two will like each other. You're so darn' different. You're awfully articulate, and you like these 'pretty people' that
you're always talking about, but she doesn't care a hang for 'em. She sits back--oh, she never misses anything, but she never says much. Still,
she's got the best instinct for honesty that I've ever known. I hope you two'll get each other. I was afraid to let her come here--didn't know
what I'd find--but now I'm going to hustle to Penrith and bring her here today."

He borrowed Twyford's car and drove to Blackwater, up to Penrith, in excellent spirits. For all the plague, they could have a lively time in the
evenings. One of the Twyford sons was not so solemn; he and Joyce, with Martin and Leora, could slip down to the lagoon for picnic suppers; they
would sing--

He came up to Penrith Lodge bawling, "Lee! Leora! Come on! HERE we are!"

The veranda, as he ran up on it, was leaf-scattered and dusty, and the front door was banging. His voice echoed in a desperate silence. He was
uneasy. He darted in, found no one in the living-room, the kitchen, then hastened into their bedroom.

On the bed, across the folds of the torn mosquito netting, was Leora's body, very frail, quite still. He cried to her, he shook her, he stood
weeping.

He talked to her, his voice a little insane, trying to make her understand that he had loved her and had left her here only for her safety--

There was rum in the kitchen, and he went out to gulp down raw full glasses. They did not affect him.

By evening he strode to the garden, the high and windy garden looking toward the sea, and dug a deep pit. He lifted her light stiff body, kissed
it, and laid it in the pit. All night he wandered. When he came back to the house and saw the row of her little dresses with the lines of her
soft body in them, he was terrified.

Then he went to pieces.

He gave up Penrith Lodge, left Twyford's, and moved into a room behind the Surgeon General's office. Beside his cot there was always a bottle.

Because death had for the first time been brought to him, he raged, "Oh, damn experimentation!" and, despite Stokes's dismay, he gave the phage
to everyone who asked.

Only in St. Swithin's, since there his experiment was so excellently begun, did some remnant of honor keep him from distributing the phage
universally; but the conduct of this experiment he turned over to Stokes.

Stokes saw that he was a little mad, but only once, when Martin snarled, "What do I care for your science?" did he try to hold Martin to his
test.

Stokes himself, with Twyford, carried on the experiment and kept the notes Martin should have kept. By evening, after working fourteen or fifteen
hours since dawn, Stokes would hasten to St. Swithin's by motor-cycle--he hated the joggling and the lack of dignity and he found it somewhat
dangerous to take curving hill-roads at sixty miles an hour, but this was the quickest way, and till midnight he conferred with Twyford, gave him
orders for the next day, arranged his clumsy annotations, and marveled at his grim meekness.

Meantime, all day, Martin injected a line of frightened citizens, in the Surgeon General's office in Blackwater. Stokes begged him at least to
turn the work over to another doctor and take what interest he could in St. Swithin's, but Martin had a bitter satisfaction in throwing away all
his significance, in helping to wreck his own purposes.

With a nurse for assistant, he stood in the bare office. File on file of people, black, white, Hindu, stood in an agitated cue a block long, ten
deep, waiting dumbly, as for death. They crept up to the nurse beside Martin and in embarrassment exposed their arms, which she scrubbed with
soap and water and dabbed with alcohol before passing them on to him. He brusquely pinched up the skin of the upper arm and jabbed it with the
needle of the syringe, cursing at them for jerking, never seeing their individual faces. As they left him they fluttered with gratitude--"Oh, may
God bless you, Doctor!"--but he did not hear.

Sometimes Stokes was there, looking anxious, particularly when in the queue he saw plantation-hands from St. Swithin's, who were supposed to
remain in their parish under strict control, to test the value of the phage. Sometimes Sir Robert Fairlamb came down to beam and gurgle and offer
his aid. . . . Lady Fairlamb had been injected first of all, and next to her a tattered kitchen wench, profuse with Hallelujah's.

After a fortnight when he was tired of the drama, he had four doctors making the injections, while he manufactured phage.

But by night Martin sat alone, tousled, drinking steadily, living on whisky and hate, freeing his soul and dissolving his body by hatred as once
hermits dissolved theirs by ecstasy. His life was as unreal as the nights of an old drunkard. He had an advantage over normal cautious humanity
in not caring whether he lived or died, he who sat with the dead, talking to Leora and Sondelius, to Ira Hinkley and Oliver Marchand, to Inchcape
Jones and a shadowy horde of blackmen with lifted appealing hands.

After Leora's death he had returned to Twyford's but once, to fetch his baggage, and he had not seen Joyce Lanyon. He hated her. He swore that it
was not her presence which had kept him from returning earlier to Leora, but he was aware that while he had been chattering with Joyce, Leora had
been dying.

"Damn' glib society climber! Thank God I'll never see HER again!"

He sat on the edge of his cot, in the constricted and airless room, his hair ruffled, his eyes blotched with red, a stray alley kitten, which he
esteemed his only friend, asleep on his pillow. At a knock he muttered, "I can't talk to Stokes now. Let him do his own experiments. Sick of
experiments!"

Sulkily, "Oh, come in!"

The door opened on Joyce Lanyon, cool, trim, sure.

"What do you want?" he grunted.

She stared at him; she shut the door; silently she straightened the litter of food, papers, and instruments on his table. She coaxed the
indignant kitten to a mat, patted the pillow, and sat by him on the frowsy cot. Then:

"Please! I know what's happened. Cecil is in town for an hour and I wanted to bring-- Won't it comfort you a little if you know how fond we are
of you? Won't you let me offer you friendship?"

"I don't want anybody's friendship. I haven't any friends!"

He sat dumb, her hand on his, but when she was gone he felt a shiver of new courage.

He could not get himself to give up his reliance on whisky, and he could see no way of discontinuing the phage-injection of all who came begging
for it, but he turned both injection and manufacture over to others, and went back to the most rigid observation of his experiment in St.
Swithin's . . . blotted as it now was by the unphaged portion of the parish going in to Blackwater to receive the phage.

He did not see Joyce. He lived at the almshouse, but most evenings now he was sober.


VI


The gospel of rat-extermination had spread through the island; everybody from five-year-old to hobbling grandam was out shooting rats and ground
squirrels. Whether from phage or rat-killing or Providence, the epidemic paused, and six months after Martin's coming, when the West Indian May
was broiling and the season of hurricanes was threatened, the plague had almost vanished and the quarantine was lifted.

St. Hubert felt safe in its kitchens and shops, and amid the roaring spring the island rejoiced as a sick man first delivered from pain rejoices
at merely living and being at peace.

That chaffering should be abusive and loud in the public market, that lovers should stroll unconscious of all save themselves, that loafers
should tell stories and drink long drinks at the Ice House, that old men should squat cackling in the shade of the mangoes, that congregations
should sing together to the Lord--this was no longer ordinary to them nor stupid, but the bliss of paradise.

They made a festival of the first steamer's leaving. White and black, Hindu and Chink and Caribbee, they crowded the wharf, shouting, waving
scarfs, trying not to weep at the feeble piping of what was left of the Blackwater Gold Medal Band; and as the steamer, the St. Ia of the McGurk
Line, was warped out, with her captain at the rail of the bridge, very straight, saluting them with a flourish but his eyes so wet that he could
not see the harbor, they felt that they were no longer jailed lepers but a part of the free world.

On the steamer Joyce Lanyon sailed. Martin said good-by to her at the wharf.

Strong of hand, almost as tall as he, she looked at him without flutter, and rejoiced, "You've come through. So have I. Both of us have been mad,
trapped here the way we've been. I don't suppose I helped you, but I did try. You see, I'd never been trained in reality. You trained me. Good-
by."

"Mayn't I come to see you in New York?"

"If you'd really like to."

She was gone, yet she had never been so much with him as through that tedious hour when the steamer was lost beyond the horizon, a line edged
with silver wire. But that night, in panic, he fled up to Penrith Lodge and buried his cheek in the damp soil above the Leora with whom he had
never had to fence and explain, to whom he had never needed to say, "Mayn't I come to see you?"

But Leora, cold in her last bed, unsmiling, did not answer him nor comfort him.


VII


Before Martin took leave he had to assemble the notes of his phage experiment; add the observation of Stokes and Twyford to his own first precise
figures.

As the giver of phage to some thousands of frightened islanders, he had become a dignitary. He was called, in the first issue of the Blackwater
Guardian after the quarantine was raised, "the savior of all our lives." He was the universal hero. If Sondelius had helped to cleanse them, had
Sondelius not been his lieutenant? If it was the intervention of the Lord, as the earnest old Negro who succeeded Ira Hinkley in the chapels of
the Sanctification Brotherhood insisted, had not the Lord surely sent him?

No one heeded a wry Scotch doctor, diligent but undramatic through the epidemic, who hinted that plagues have been known to slacken and cease
without phage.

When Martin was completing his notes he had a letter from the McGurk Institute, signed by Rippleton Holabird.

Holabird wrote that Gottlieb was "feeling seedy," that he had resigned the Directorship, suspended his own experimentation, and was now at home,
resting. Holabird himself had been appointed Acting Director of the Institute, and as such he chanted:


The reports of your work in the letters from Mr. McGurk's agents which the quarantine authorities have permitted to get through to us apprize us
far more than does your own modest report what a really sensational success you have had. You have done what few other men living could do, both
established the value of bacteriophage in plague by tests on a large scale, and saved most of the unfortunate population. The Board of Trustees
and I are properly appreciative of the glory which you have added, and still more will add when your report is published, to the name of McGurk
institute, and we are thinking, now that we may for some months be unable to have your titular chief, Dr. Gottlieb, working with us, of
establishing a separate Department, with you as its head.


"Established the value--rats! I about half made the tests," sighed Martin, and: "Department! I've given too many orders here. Sick of authority.
I want to get back to my lab and start all over again."

It came to him that now he would probably have ten thousand a year. . . . Leora would have enjoyed small extravagant dinners.

Though he had watched Gottlieb declining, it was a shock that he could be so unwell as to drop his work even for a few months.

He forgot his own self as it came to him that in giving up his experiment, playing the savior, he had been a traitor to Gottlieb and all that
Gottlieb represented. When he returned to New York he would have to call on the old man and admit to him, to those sunken relentless eyes, that
he did not have complete proof of the value of the phage.

If he could have run to Leora with his ten thousand a year--


VIII


He left St. Hubert three weeks after Joyce Lanyon.

The evening before his sailing, a great dinner with Sir Robert Fairlamb in the chair was given to him and to Stokes. While Sir Robert ruddily
blurted compliments and Kellett tried to explain things, and all of them drank to him, standing, after the toast to the King, Martin sat lonely,
considering that tomorrow he would leave these trusting eyes and face the harsh demands of Gottlieb, of Terry Wickett.

The more they shouted his glory, the more he thought about what unknown, tight-minded scientists in distant laboratories would say of a man who
had had his chance and cast it away. The more they called him the giver of life, the more he felt himself disgraced and a traitor; and as he
looked at Stokes he saw in his regard a pity worse than condemnation.




Chapter 36



It happened that Martin returned to New York, as he had come, on the St. Buryan. The ship was haunted with the phantoms of Leora dreaming, of
Sondelius shouting on the bridge.

And on the St. Buryan was the country-club Miss Gwilliam who had offended Sondelius.

She had spent the winter importantly making notes on native music in Trinidad and Caracas; at least in planning to make notes. She saw Martin
come aboard at Blackwater, and pertly noted the friends who saw him off--two Englishmen, one puffy, one rangy, and a dry-looking Scotsman.

"Your friends all seem to be British," she enlightened him, when she had claimed him as an old friend.

"Yes."

"You've spent the winter here."

"Yes."

"Hard luck to be caught by the quarantine. But I TOLD you you were silly to go ashore! You must have managed to pick up quite a little money
practicing. But it must have been unpleasant, really."

"Ye--es, I suppose it was."

"I told you it would be! You ought to have come on to Trinidad. Such a fascinating island! And tell me, how is the Roughneck?"

"Who?"

"Oh, you know--that funny Swede that used to dance and everything."

"He is dead."

"Oh, I AM sorry. You know, no matter what the others said, I never thought he was so bad. I'm sure he had quite a nice cultured mind, when he
wasn't carousing around. Your wife isn't with you, is she?"

"No--she isn't with me. I must go down and unpack now." Miss Gwilliam looked after him with an expression which said that the least people could
do was to learn some manners.


II


With the heat and the threat of hurricanes, there were few first-class passengers on the St. Buryan, and most of these did not count, because
they were not jolly, decent Yankee tourists but merely South Americans. As tourists do when their minds have been broadened and enriched by
travel, when they return to New Jersey or Wisconsin with the credit of having spent a whole six months in the West Indies and South America, the
respectable remnant studied one another fastidiously, and noted the slim pale man who seemed so restless, who all day trudged round the deck, who
after midnight was seen standing by himself at the rail.

"That guy looks awful' restless to me!" said Mr. S. Sanborn Hibble of Detroit to the charming Mrs. Dawson of Memphis, and she answered, with the
wit which made her so popular wherever she went, "Yes, don't he. I reckon he must be in love!"

"Oh, I know him!" said Miss Gwilliam. "He and his wife were on the St. Buryan when I came down. She's in New York now. He's some kind of a
doctor--not awful' successful I don't believe. Just between ourselves, I don't think much of him or of her either. They sat and looked stupid all
the way down."


III


Martin was itching to get his fingers on his test-tubes. He knew, as once he had guessed, that he hated administration and Large Affairs.

As he tramped the deck, his head cleared and he was himself. Angrily he pictured the critics who would soon be pecking at whatever final report
he might make. For a time he hated the criticism of his fellow laboratory-grinds as he had hated their competition; he hated the need of forever
looking over his shoulder at pursuers. But on a night when he stood at the rail for hours, he admitted that he was afraid of their criticism, and
afraid because his experiment had so many loopholes. He hurled overboard all the polemics with which he had protected himself: "Men who never
have had the experience of trying, in the midst of an epidemic, to remain calm and keep experimental conditions, do not realize in the security
of their laboratories what one has to contend with."

Constant criticism was good, if only it was not spiteful, jealous, petty--

No, even then it might be good! Some men had to be what easy-going workers called "spiteful." To them the joyous spite of crushing the almost-
good was more natural than creation. Why should a great house-wrecker, who could clear the cumbered ground, be set at trying to lay brick?

"All right!" he rejoiced. "Let 'em come! Maybe I'll anticipate 'em and publish a roast of my own work. I have got something, from the St. Swithin
test, even if I did let things slide for a while. I'll take my tables to a biometrician. He may rip 'em up. Good! What's left, I'll publish."

He went to bed feeling that he could face the eyes of Gottlieb and Terry, and for the first time in weeks he slept without terror.


IV


At the pier in Brooklyn, to the astonishment and slight indignation of Miss Gwilliam, Mr. S. Sanborn Hibble, and Mrs. Dawson, Martin was greeted
by reporters who agreeably though vaguely desired to know what were these remarkable things he had been doing to some disease or other, in some
island some place.

He was rescued from them by Rippleton Holabird, who burst through them with his hands out, crying, "Oh, my dear fellow! We know all that's
happened. We grieve for you so, and we're so glad you were spared to come back to us."

Whatever Martin might, under the shadow of Max Gottlieb, have said about Holabird, now he wrung his hands and muttered, "It's good to be home."

Holabird (he was wearing a blue shirt with a starched blue collar, like an actor) could not wait till Martin's baggage had gone through the
customs. He had to return to his duties as Acting Director of the Institute. He delayed only to hint that the Board of Trustees were going to
make him full Director, and that certainly, my dear fellow, he would see that Martin had the credit and the reward he deserved.

When Holabird was gone, driving away in his neat coupe (he often explained that his wife and he could afford a chauffeur, but they preferred to
spend the money on other things), Martin was conscious of Terry Wickett, leaning against a gnawed wooden pillar of the wharf-house, as though he
had been there for hours.

Terry strolled up and snorted, "Hello, Slim. All O.K.? Lez shoot the stuff through the customs. Great pleasure to see the Director and you
kissing."

As they drove through the summer-walled streets of Brooklyn, Martin inquired, "How's Holabird working out as Director? And how is Gottlieb?"

"Oh, the Holy Wren is no worse than Tubbs; he's even politer and more ignorant. . . . Me, you watch me! One of these days I'm going off to the
woods--got a shack in Vermont--going to work there without having to produce results for the Director! They've stuck me in the Department of
Biochemistry. And Gottlieb--" Terry's voice became anxious. "I guess he's pretty shaky-- They've pensioned him off. Now look, Slim: I hear you're
going to be a gilded department-head, and I'll never be anything but an associate member. Are you going on with me, or are you going to be one of
the Holy Wren's pets--hero-scientist?"

"I'm with you, Terry, you old grouch." Martin dropped the cynicism which had always seemed proper between him and Terry. "I haven't got anybody
else. Leora and Gustaf are gone and now maybe Gottlieb. You and I have got to stick together!"

"It's a go!"

They shook hands, they coughed gruffly, and talked of straw hats.


V


When Martin entered the Institute, his colleagues galloped up to shake hands and to exclaim, and if their praise was flustering, there is no time
at which one can stomach so much of it as at home-coming.

Sir Robert Fairlamb had written to the Institute a letter glorifying him. The letter arrived on the same boat with Martin, and next day Holabird
gave it out to the press.

The reporters, who had been only a little interested at his landing, came around for interviews, and while Martin was sulky and jerky Holabird
took them in hand, so that the papers were able to announce that America, which was always rescuing the world from something or other, had gone
and done it again. It was spread in the prints that Dr. Martin Arrowsmith was not only a powerful witch-doctor and possibly something of a
laboratory-hand, but also a ferocious rat-killer, village-burner, Special Board addresser, and snatcher from death. There was at the time, in
certain places, a doubt as to how benevolent the United States had been to its Little Brothers--Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua--and the editors
and politicians were grateful to Martin for this proof of their sacrifice and tender watchfulness.

He had letters from the Public Health service; from an enterprising Midwestern college which desired to make him a Doctor of Civil Law; from
medical schools and societies which begged him to address them. Editorials on his work appeared in the medical journals and the newspapers; and
Congressman Almus Pickerbaugh telegraphed him from Washington in what the Congressman may conceivably have regarded as verse: "They got to go
some to get ahead of fellows that come from old Nautilus." And he was again invited to dinner at the McGurks', not by Capitola but by Ross
McGurk, whose name had never had such a whitewashing.

He refused all invitations to speak, and the urgent organizations which had invited him responded with meekness that they understood how
intimidatingly busy Dr. Arrowsmith was, and if he ever COULD find the time, they would be most highly honored--

Rippleton Holabird was elected full Director now, in succession to Gottlieb, and he sought to use Martin as the prize exhibit of the Institute.
He brought all the visiting dignitaries, all the foreign Men of Measured Merriment, in to see him, and they looked pleased and tried to think up
questions. Then Martin was made head of the new Department of Microbiology at twice his old salary.

He never did learn what was the difference between microbiology and bacteriology. But none of his glorification could he resist. He was still too
dazed--he was more dazed when he had seen Max Gottlieb.


VI


The morning after his return he had telephoned to Gottlieb's flat, had spoken to Miriam and received permission to call in the late afternoon.

All the way uptown he could hear Gottlieb saying, "You were my son! I gave you eferyt'ing I knew of truth and honor, and you haf betrayed me. Get
out of my sight!"

Miriam met him in the hall, fretting, "I don't know if I should have let you come at all, Doctor."

"Why? Isn't he well enough to see people?"

"It isn't that. He doesn't really seem ill, except that he's feeble, but he doesn't know anyone. The doctors say it's senile dementia. His memory
is gone. And he's just suddenly forgotten all his English. He can only speak German, and I can't speak it, hardly at all. If I'd only studied it,
instead of music! But perhaps it may do him good to have you here. He was always so fond of you. You don't know how he talked of you and the
splendid experiment you've been doing in St. Hubert."

"Well, I--" He could find nothing to say.

Miriam led him into a room whose walls were dark with books. Gottlieb was sunk in a worn chair, his thin hand lax on the arm.

"Doctor, it's Arrowsmith, just got back!" Martin mumbled.

The old man looked as though he half understood; he peered at him, then shook his head and whimpered, "Versteh' nicht." His arrogant eyes were
clouded with ungovernable slow tears.

Martin understood that never could he be punished now and cleansed. Gottlieb had sunk into his darkness still trusting him.


VII


Martin closed his flat--their flat--with a cold swift fury, lest he yield to his misery in finding among Leora's possessions a thousand fragments
which brought her back: the frock she had bought for Capitola McGurk's dinner, a petrified chocolate she had hidden away to munch illegally by
night, a memorandum, "Get almonds for Sandy." He took a grimly impersonal room in a hotel, and sunk himself in work. There was nothing for him
but work and the harsh friendship of Terry Wickett.

His first task was to check the statistics of his St. Swithin treatments and the new figures still coming in from Stokes. Some of them were
shaky, some suggested that the value of phage certainly had been confirmed, but there was nothing final. He took his figures to Raymond Pearl the
biometrician, who thought less of them than did Martin himself.

He had already made a report of his work to the Director and the Trustees of the Institute, with no conclusion except "the results await
statistical analysis and should have this before they are published." But Holabird had run wild, the newspapers had reported wonders, and in on
Martin poured demands that he send out phage; inquiries as to whether he did not have a phage for tuberculosis, for syphilis; offers that he take
charge of this epidemic and that.

Pearl had pointed out that his agreeable results in first phaging the whole of Carib village must be questioned, because it was possible that
when he began, the curve of the disease had already passed its peak. With this and the other complications, viewing his hot work in St. Hubert as
coldly as though it were the pretense of a man whom he had never seen, Martin decided that he had no adequate proof, and strode in to see the
Director.

Holabird was gentle and pretty, but he sighed that if this conclusion were published, he would have to take back all the things he had said about
the magnificence which, presumably, he had inspired his subordinate to accomplish. He was gentle and pretty, but firm; Martin was to suppress
(Holabird did not say "suppress"--he said "leave to me for further consideration") the real statistical results, and issue the report with an
ambiguous summary.

Martin was furious, Holabird delicately relentless. Martin hastened to Terry, declaring that he would resign--would denounce--would expose-- Yes!
He would! He no longer had to support Leora. He'd work as a drug-clerk. He'd go back right now and tell the Holy Wren--

"Hey! Slim! Wait a minute! Hold your horses!" observed Terry. "Just get along with Holy for a while, and we'll work out something we can do
together and be independent. Meanwhile you have got your lab here, and you still have some physical chemistry to learn! And, uh-- Slim, I haven't
said anything about your St. Hubert stuff, but you know and I know you bunged it up badly. Can you come into court with clean hands, if you're
going to indict the Holy One? Though I do agree that aside from being a dirty, lying, social-climbing, sneaking, power-grabbing hypocrite, he's
all right. Hold on. We'll fix up something. Why, son, we've just been learning our science; we're just beginning to work."

Then Holabird published officially, under the Institute's seal, Martin's original report to the Trustees, with such quaint revisions as a change
of "the results should have analysis" to "while statistical analysis would seem desirable, it is evident that this new treatment has accomplished
all that had been hoped."

Again Martin went mad, again Terry calmed him; and with a hard fury unlike his eagerness of the days when he had known that Leora was waiting for
him he resumed his physical chemistry.

He learned the involved mysteries of freezing-point determinations, osmotic pressure determinations, and tried to apply Northrop's
generalizations on enzymes to the study of phage.

He became absorbed in mathematical laws which strangely predicted natural phenomena; his world was cold, exact, austerely materialistic, bitter
to those who founded their logic on impressions. He was daily more scornful toward the counters of paving stones, the renamers of species, the
compilers of irrelevant data. In his absorption the pleasant seasons passed unseen.

Once he raised his head in astonishment to perceive that it was spring; once Terry and he tramped two hundred miles through the Pennsylvania
hills, by summer roads; but it seemed only a day later when it was Christmas, and Holabird was being ever so jolly and yuley about the Institute.

The absence of Gottlieb may have been good for Martin, since he no longer turned to the master for solutions in tough queries. When he took up
diffusion problems, he began to develop his own apparatus, and whether it was from inborn ingenuity or merely from a fury of labor, he was so
competent that he won from Terry the almost overwhelming praise: "Why, that's not so darn' bad, Slim!"

The sureness to which Max Gottlieb seems to have been born came to Martin slowly, after many stumblings, but it came. He desired a perfection of
technique in the quest for absolute and provable fact; he desired as greatly as any Pater to "burn with a hard gem-like flame," and he desired
not to have ease and repute in the market-place, but rather to keep free of those follies, lest they confuse him and make him soft.

Holabird was as much bewildered as Tubbs would have been by the ramifications of Martin's work. What did he think he was anyway--a bacteriologist
or a bio-physicist? But Holabird was won by the scientific world's reception of Martin's first important paper, on the effect of X-rays, gamma
rays, and beta rays on the anti-Shiga phage. It was praised in Paris and Brussels and Cambridge as much as in New York, for its insight and for
"the clarity and to perhaps be unscientifically enthusiastic, the sheer delight and style of its presentation," as Professor Berkeley Wurtz put
it; which may be indicated by quoting the first paragraph of the paper:


In a preliminary publication, I have reported a marked qualitative destructive effect of the radiations from radium emanations on Bacteriophage-
anti-Shiga. In the present paper it is shown that X-rays, gamma rays, and beta rays produce identical inactivating effects on this bacteriophage.
Furthermore, a quantitative relation is demonstrated to exist between this inactivation and the radiations that produce it. The results obtained
from this quantitative study permit the statement that the percentage of inactivation, as measured by determining the units of bacteriophage
remaining after irradiation by gamma and beta rays of a suspension of fixed virulence, is a function of the two variables, nillicuries and hours.
The following equation accounts quantitatively for the experimental results obtained:


u0 lambda log e --u K = ---------------------E0(epsilon-lambda t1)


When Director Holabird saw the paper--Yeo was vicious enough to take it in and ask his opinion--he said, "Splendid, oh, I say, simply splendid!
I've just had the chance to skim through it, old boy, but I shall certainly read it carefully, the first free moment I have."




Chapter 37



Martin did not see Joyce Lanyon for weeks after his return to New York. Once she invited him to dinner, but he could not come, and he did not
hear from her again.

His absorption in osmotic pressure determinations did not content him when he sat in his prim hotel room and was reduced from Dr. Arrowsmith to a
man who had no one to talk to. He remembered how they had sat by the lagoon in the tepid twilight; he telephoned asking whether he might come in
for tea.

He knew in an unformulated way that Joyce was rich, but after seeing her in gingham, cooking in the kitchen of St. Swithin's almshouse, he did
not grasp her position; and he was uncomfortable when, feeling dusty from the laboratory, he came to her great house and found her the soft-
voiced mistress of many servants. Hers was a palace, and palaces, whether they are such very little ones as Joyce's, with its eighteen rooms, or
Buckingham or vast Fontainebleau, are all alike; they are choked with the superfluities of pride, they are so complete that one does not remember
small endearing charms, they are indistinguishable in their common feeling of polite and uneasy grandeur, they are therefore altogether tedious.

But amid the pretentious splendor which Roger Lanyon had accumulated, Joyce was not tedious. It is to be suspected that she enjoyed showing
Martin what she really was, by producing footmen and too many kinds of sandwiches, and by boasting, "Oh, I never do know what they're going to
give me for tea."

But she had welcomed him, crying, "You look so much better. I'm frightfully glad. Are you still my brother? I was a good cook at the almshouse,
wasn't I!"

Had he been suave then and witty, she would not have been greatly interested. She knew too many men who were witty and well-bred, ivory smooth
and competent to help her spend the four or five million dollars with which she was burdened. But Martin was at once a scholar who made osmotic
pressure determinations almost interesting, a taut swift man whom she could fancy running or making love, and a lonely youngster who naively
believed that here in her soft security she was still the girl who had sat with him by the lagoon, still the courageous woman who had come to him
in a drunken room at Blackwater.

Joyce Lanyon knew how to make men talk. Thanks more to her than to his own articulateness, he made living the Institute, the members, their
feuds, and the drama of coursing on the trail of a discovery.

Her easy life here had seemed tasteless after the risks of St. Hubert, and in his contempt for ease and rewards she found exhilaration.

He came now and then to tea, to dinner; he learned the ways of her house, her servants, the more nearly intelligent of her friends. He liked--and
possibly he was liked by--some of them. With one friend of hers Martin had a state of undeclared war. This was Latham Ireland, an achingly well-
dressed man of fifty, a competent lawyer who was fond of standing in front of fireplaces and being quietly clever. He fascinated Joyce by telling
her that she was subtle, then telling her what she was being subtle about.

Martin hated him.

In midsummer Martin was invited for a week-end at Joyce's vast blossom-hid country house at Greenwich. She was half apologetic for its luxury; he
was altogether unhappy.

The strain of considering clothes; of galloping out to buy white trousers when he wanted to watch the test-tubes in the constant-temperature
bath, of trying to look easy in the limousine which met him at the station, and of deciding which servants to tip and how much and when, was
dismaying to a simple man. He felt rustic when, after he had blurted, "Just a minute til I go up and unpack my suit-case," she said gently, "Oh,
that will have been done for you."

He discovered that a valet had laid out for him to put on, that first evening, all the small store of underclothes he had brought, and had
squeezed out on his brush a ribbon of toothpaste.

He sat on the edge of his bed, groaning, "This is too rich for my blood!"

He hated and feared that valet, who kept stealing his clothes, putting them in places where they could not be found, then popping in menacingly
when Martin was sneaking about the enormous room looking for them.

But his chief unhappiness was that there was nothing to do. He had no sport but tennis, at which he was too rusty to play with these chattering
unidentified people who filled the house and, apparently with perfect willingness, worked at golf and bridge. He had met but few of the friends
of whom they talked. They said, "You know dear old R. G.," and he said, "Oh, YES," but he never did know dear old R. G.

Joyce was as busily amiable as when they were alone at tea, and she found for him a weedy flapper whose tennis was worse than his own, but she
had twenty guests--forty at Sunday lunch--and he gave up certain agreeable notions of walking with her in fresh lanes and, after excitedly saying
this and that, perhaps kissing her. He had one moment with her. As he was going, she ordered, "Come here, Martin," and led him apart.

"You haven't really enjoyed it."

"Why, sure, course I--"

"Of course you haven't! And you despise us, rather, and perhaps you're partly right. I do like pretty people and gracious manners and good games,
but I suppose they seem piffling after nights in a laboratory."

"No, I like 'em too. In a way. I like to look at beautiful women--at you! But-- Oh, darn it, Joyce, I'm not up to it. I've always been poor and
horribly busy. I haven't learned your games."

"But, Martin, you could, with the intensity you put into everything."

"Even getting drunk in Blackwater!"

"And I hope in New York, too! Dear Roger, he did have such an innocent, satisfying time getting drunk at class-dinners! But I mean: if you went
at it, you could play bridge and golf--and talking--better than any of them. If you only knew how frightfully recent most of the ducal class in
America are! And Martin: wouldn't it be good for you? Wouldn't you work all the better if you got away from your logarithmic tables now and then?
And are you going to admit there's anything you can't conquer?"

"No, I--"

"Will you come to dinner on Tuesday week, just us two, and we'll fight it out?"

"Be glad to."

For a number of hours, on the train to Terry Wickett's vacation place in the Vermont hills, Martin was convinced that he loved Joyce Lanyon, and
that he was going to attack the art of being amusing as he had attacked physical chemistry. Ardently, and quite humorlessly, as he sat stiffly in
a stale Pullman chaircar with his feet up on his suit-case, he pictured himself wearing a club-tie (presumably first acquiring the tie and the
club), playing golf in plus-fours, and being entertaining about dear old R. G. and incredibly witty about dear old Latham Ireland's aged Rolls-
Royce.

But these ambitions he forgot as he came to Terry's proud proprietary shanty, by a lake among oaks and maples, and heard Terry's real theories of
the decomposition of quinine derivatives.

Being perhaps the least sentimental of human beings, Terry had named his place "Birdies' Rest." He owned five acres of woodland, two miles from a
railroad station. His shanty was a two-room affair of logs, with bunks for beds and oilcloth for table-linen.

"Here's the layout, Slim," said Terry. "Some day I'm going to figure out a way of making a lab here pay, by manufacturing sera or something, and
I'll put up a couple more buildings on the flat by the lake, and have one absolutely independent place for science---two hours a day on the
commercial end, and say about six for sleeping and a couple for feeding and telling dirty stories. That leaves--two and six and two make ten, if
I'm any authority on higher math--that leaves fourteen hours a day for research (except when you got something special on), with no Director and
no Society patrons and no Trustees that you've got to satisfy by making fool reports. Of course there won't be any scientific dinners with ladies
in candy-box dresses, but I figure we'll be able to afford plenty of salt pork and corncob pipes, and your bed will be made perfectly--if you
make it yourself. Huh? Lez go and have a swim."

Martin returned to New York with the not very compatible plans of being the best-dressed golfer in Greenwich and of cooking beef-stew with Terry
at Birdies' Rest.

But the first of these was the more novel to him.


II


Joyce Lanyon was enjoying a conversion. Her St. Hubert experiences and her natural variability had caused her to be dissatisfied with Roger's
fast-motoring set.

She let the lady Maecenases of her acquaintance beguile her into several of their Causes, and she enjoyed them as she had enjoyed her active and
entirely purposeless war work in 1917, for Joyce Lanyon was to some degree an Arranger, which was an epithet invented by Terry Wickett for
Capitola McGurk.

An Arranger and even an Improver was Joyce, but she was not a Capitola; she neither waved a feathered fan and spoke spaciously, nor did she take
out her sex-passion in talking. She was fine and occasionally gorgeous, with tiger in her, though she was as far from perfumed-boudoir and black-
lingerie passion as she was from Capitola's cooling staleness. Hers was sheer straight white silk and cherished skin.

Behind all her reasons for valuing Martin was the fact that the only time in her life when she had felt useful and independent was when she had
been an almshouse cook.

She might have drifted on, in her world of drifters, but for the interposition of Latham Ireland, the lawyer-dilettante lover.

"Joy," he observed, "there seems to be an astounding quantity of that Dr. Arrowsmith person about the place. As your benign uncle--"

"Latham, my sweet, I quite agree that Martin is too aggressive, thoroughly unlicked, very selfish, rather a prig, absolutely a pedant, and his
shirts are atrocious. And I rather think I shall marry him. I almost think I love him!"

"Wouldn't cyanide be a neater way of doing suicide?" said Latham Ireland.


III


What Martin felt for Joyce was what any widowed man of thirty-eight would feel for a young and pretty and well-spoken woman who was attentive to
his wisdom. As to her wealth, there was no problem at all. He was no poor man marrying money! Why, he was making ten thousand a year, which was
eight thousand more than he needed to live on!

Occasionally he was suspicious of her dependence on luxury. With tremendous craft he demanded that instead of their dining in her Jacobean hall
of state, she come with him on his own sort of party. She came, with enthusiasm. They went to abysmal Greenwich Village restaurants with candles,
artistic waiters, and no food; or to Chinatown dives with food and nothing else. He even insisted on their taking the subway--though after dinner
he usually forgot that he was being Spartan, and ordered a taxicab. She accepted it all without either wincing or too much gurgling.

She played tennis with him in the court on her roof; she taught him bridge, which, with his concentration and his memory, he soon played better
than she and enjoyed astonishingly; she persuaded him that he had a leg and would look well in golf clothes.

He came to take her to dinner, on a serene autumn evening. He had a taxi waiting.

"Why don't we stick to the subway?" she said.

They were standing on her doorstep, in a blankly expensive and quite unromantic street off Fifth Avenue.

"Oh, I hate the rotten subway as much as you do! Elbows in my stomach never did help me much to plan experiments. I expect when we're married
I'll enjoy your limousine."

"Is this a proposal? I'm not at all sure I'm going to marry you. Really, I'm NOT! You have no sense of ease!"

They were married the following January, in St. George's Church, and Martin suffered almost as much over the flowers, the bishop, the relatives
with high-pitched voices, and the top hat which Joyce had commanded, as he did over having Rippleton Holabird wring his hand with a look of, "At
last, dear boy, you have come out of barbarism and become One of Us."

Martin had asked Terry to be his best man. Terry had refused, and asserted that only with pain would he come to the wedding at all. The best man
was Dr. William Smith, with his beard trimmed for the occasion, and distressing morning clothes and a topper which he had bought in London eleven
years before, but both of them were safe in charge of a cousin of Joyce who was guaranteed to have extra handkerchiefs and to recognize the
Wedding March. He had understood that Martin was Groton and Harvard, and when he discovered that he was Winnemac and nothing at all, he became
suspicious.

In their stateroom on the steamer Joyce murmured, "Dear, you were brave! I didn't know what a damn' fool that cousin of mine was. Kiss me!"

Thenceforth . . . except for a dreadful second when Leora floated between them, eyes closed and hands crossed on her pale cold breast . . . they
were happy and in each other found adventurous new ways.


IV


For three months they wandered in Europe.

On the first day Joyce had said, "Let's have this beastly money thing over. I should think you are the least mercenary of men. I've put ten
thousand dollars to your credit in London--oh, yes, and fifty thousand in New York--and if you'd like, when you have to do things for me, I'd be
glad if you'd draw on it. No! Wait! Can't you see how easy and decent I want to make it all? You won't hurt me to save your own self-respect?"


V


They really had, it seemed, to stay with the Principessa del Oltraggio (formerly Miss Lucy Deemy Bessy of Dayton), Madame des Basses Loges (Miss
Brown of San Francisco), and the Countess of Marazion (who had been Mrs. Arthur Snaipe of Albany, and several things before that), but Joyce did
go with him to see the great laboratories in London, Paris, Copenhagen. She swelled to perceive how Nobel-prize winners received Her Husband,
knew of him, desired to be violent with him about phage, and showed him their work of years. Some of them were hasty and graceless, she thought.
Her Man was prettier than any of them, and if she would but be patient with him, she could make him master polo and clothes and conversation . .
. but of course go on with his science . . . a pity he could not have a knighthood, like one or two of the British scientists they met. But even
in America there were honorary degrees. . . .

While she discovered and digested Science, Martin discovered Women.


VI


Aware only of Madeline Fox and Orchid Pickerbaugh, who were Nice American Girls, of soon-forgotten ladies of the night, and of Leora, who, in her
indolence, her indifference to decoration and good fame, was neither woman nor wife but only her own self, Martin knew nothing whatever about
Women. He had expected Leora to wait for him, to obey his wishes, to understand without his saying them all the flattering things he had planned
to say. He was spoiled, and Joyce was not timorous about telling him so.

It was not for her to sit beaming and wordless while he and his fellow-researchers arranged the world. With many jolts he perceived that even
outside the bedroom he had to consider the fluctuations and variables of his wife, as A Woman, and sometimes as A Rich Woman.

It was confusing to find that where Leora had acidly claimed sex-loyalty but had hummingly not cared in what manner he might say Good Morning,
Joyce was indifferent as to how many women he might have fondled (so long as he did not insult her by making love to them in her presence) but
did require him to say Good Morning as though he meant it. It was confusing to find how starkly she discriminated between his caresses when he
was absorbed in her and his hasty interest when he wanted to go to sleep. She could, she said, kill a man who considered her merely convenient
furniture, and she uncomfortably emphasized the "kill."

She expected him to remember her birthday, her taste in wine, her liking for flowers, and her objection to viewing the process of shaving. She
wanted a room to herself; she insisted that he knock before entering; and she demanded that he admire her hats.

When he was so interested in the work at Pasteur Institute that he had a clerk telephone that he would not be able to meet her for dinner, she
was tight-lipped with rage.

"Oh, you got to expect that," he reflected, feeling that he was being tactful and patient and penetrating.

It annoyed him, sometimes, that she would never impulsively start off on a walk with him. No matter how brief the jaunt, she must first go to her
room for white gloves--placidly stand there drawing them on. . . . And in London she made him buy spats . . . and even wear them.

Joyce was not only an Arranger--she was a Loyalist. Like most American cosmopolites she revered the English peerage, adopted all their standards
and beliefs--or what she considered their standards and beliefs--and treasured her encounters with them. Three and a half years after the War of
1914-18, she still said that she loathed all Germans, and the one complete quarrel between her and Martin occurred when he desired to see the
laboratories in Berlin and Vienna.

But for all their differences it was a romantic pilgrimage. They loved fearlessly; they tramped through the mountains and came back to revel in
vast bathrooms and ingenious dinners; they idled before cafes, and save when he fell silent as he remembered how much Leora had wanted to sit
before cafes in France, they showed each other all the eagernesses of their minds.

Europe, her Europe, which she had always known and loved, Joyce offered to him on generous hands, and he who had ever been sensitive to warm
colors and fine gestures--when he was not frenzied with work--was grateful to her and boyish with wonder. He believed that he was learning to
take life easily and beautifully; he criticized Terry Wickett (but only to himself) for provincialism; and so in a golden leisure they came back
to America and prohibition and politicians charging to protect the Steel Trust from the communists, to conversation about bridge and motors and
to osmotic pressure determinations.




Chapter 38



Director Rippleton Holabird had also married money, and whenever his colleagues hinted that since his first ardent work in physiology he had done
nothing but arrange a few nicely selected flowers on the tables hewn out by other men, it was a satisfaction to him to observe that these rotters
came down to the Institute by subway, while he drove elegantly in his coupe. But now Arrowsmith, once the poorest of them all, came by limousine
with a chauffeur who touched his hat, and Holabird's coffee was salted.

There was a simplicity in Martin, but it cannot be said that he did not lick his lips when Holabird mooned at the chauffeur.

His triumph over Holabird was less than being able to entertain Angus Duer and his wife, on from Chicago; to introduce them to Director Holabird,
to Salamon the king of surgeons, and to a medical baronet; and to have Angus gush, "Mart, do you mind my saying we're all awfully proud of you?
Rouncefield was speaking to me about it the other day. 'It may be presumptuous,' he said, 'but I really feel that perhaps the training we tried
to give Dr. Arrowsmith here in the Clinic did in some way contribute to his magnificent work in the West Indies and at McGurk.' What a lovely
woman your wife is, old man! Do you suppose she'd mind telling Mrs. Duer where she got that frock?"

Martin had heard about the superiority of poverty to luxury, but after the lunch-wagons of Mohalis, after twelve years of helping Leora check the
laundry and worry about the price of steak, after a life of waiting in the slush for trolleys, it was not at all dismaying to have a valet who
produced shirts automatically; not at all degrading to come to meals which were always interesting, and, in the discretion of his car, to lean an
aching head against softness and think how clever he was.

"You see, by having other people do the vulgar things for you, it saves your own energy for the things that only you can do," said Joyce.

Martin agreed, then drove to Westchester for a lesson in golf.

A week after their return from Europe, Joyce went with him to see Gottlieb. He fancied that Gottlieb came out of his brooding to smile on them.

"After all," Martin considered, "the old man did like beautiful things. If he'd had the chance, he might've liked a big Establishment, too,
maybe."

Terry was surprisingly complaisant.

"I'll tell you, Slim--if you want to know. Personally I'd hate to have to live up to servants. But I'm getting old and wise. I figure that
different folks like different things, and awful' few of 'em have the sense to come and ask me what they ought to like. But honest, Slim, I don't
think I'll come to dinner. I've gone and bought a dress-suit--BOUGHT it! got it in my room--damn' landlady keeps filling it with moth-balls--but
I don't think I could stand listening to Latham Ireland being clever."

It was, however, Rippleton Holabird's attitude which most concerned Martin, for Holabird did not let him forget that unless he desired to drift
off and be merely a ghostly Rich Woman's husband, he would do well to remember who was Director.

Along with the endearing manners which he preserved for Ross McGurk, Holabird had developed the remoteness, the inhuman quiet courtesy, of the
Man of Affairs, and people who presumed on his old glad days he courteously put in their places. He saw the need of repressing insubordination,
when Arrowsmith appeared in a limousine. He gave him one week after his return to enjoy the limousine, then blandly called on him in his
laboratory.

"Martin," he sighed, "I find that our friend Ross McGurk is just a bit dissatisfied with the practical results that are coming out of the
Institute and, to convince him, I'm afraid I really must ask you to put less emphasis on bacteriophage for the moment and take up influenza. The
Rockefeller Institute has the right idea. They've utilized their best minds, and spent money magnificently, on such problems as pneumonia,
meningitis, cancer. They've already lessened the terrors of meningitis and pneumonia, and yellow fever is on the verge of complete abolition
through Noguchi's work, and I have no doubt their hospital, with its enormous resources and splendidly co-operating minds, will be the first to
find something to alleviate diabetes. Now, I understand, they're hot after the cause of influenza. They're not going to permit another great
epidemic of it. Well, dear chap, it's up to us to beat them on the flu, and I've chosen you to represent us in the race."

Martin was at the moment hovering over a method of reproducing phage on dead bacteria, but he could not refuse, he could not risk being
discharged. He was too rich! Martin the renegade medical student could flounder off and be a soda-clerk, but if the husband of Joyce Lanyon
should indulge in such insanity, he would be followed by reporters and photographed at the soda handles. Still less could he chance becoming
merely her supported husband--a butler of the boudoir.

He assented, not very pleasantly.

He began to work on the cause of influenza with a half-heartedness almost magnificent. In the hospitals he secured cultures from cases which
might be influenza and might be bad colds--no one was certain just what the influenza symptoms were; nothing was clean cut. He left most of the
work to his assistants, occasionally giving them sardonic directions to "put on another hundred tubes of the A medium--hell, make it another
thousand!" and when he found that they were doing as they pleased, he was not righteous nor rebuking. If he did not guiltily turn his hand from
the plow it was only because he never touched the plow. Once his own small laboratory had been as fussily neat as a New Hampshire kitchen. Now
the several rooms under his charge were a disgrace, with long racks of abandoned test-tubes, many half-filled with mold, none of them properly
labeled.

Then he had his idea. He began firmly to believe that the Rockefeller investigators had found the cause of flu. He gushed in to Holabird and told
him so. As for himself, he was going back to his search for the real nature of phage.

Holabird argued that Martin must be wrong. If Holabird wanted the McGurk Institute--and the Director of the McGurk Institute--to have the credit
for capturing influenza, then it simply could not be possible that Rockefeller was ahead of them. He also said weighty things about phage. Its
essential nature, he pointed out, was an academic question.

But Martin was by now too much of a scientific dialectician for Holabird, who gave up and retired to his den (or so Martin gloomily believed) to
devise new ways of plaguing him. For a time Martin was again left free to wallow in work.

He found a means of reproducing phage on dead bacteria by a very complicated, very delicate use of partial oxygen-carbon dioxide tension--as
exquisite as cameo-carving, as improbable as weighing the stars. His report stirred the laboratory world, and here and there (in Tokio, in
Amsterdam, in Winnemac) enthusiasts believed he had proven that phage was a living organism; and other enthusiasts said, in esoteric language
with mathematical formulae, that he was a liar and six kinds of a fool.

It was at this time, when he might have become a Great Man, that he pitched over most of his own work and some of the duties of being Joyce's
husband to follow Terry Wickett, which showed that he lacked common sense, because Terry was still an assistant while he himself was head of a
department.

Terry had discovered that certain quinine derivatives when introduced into the animal body slowly decompose into products which are highly toxic
to bacteria but only mildly toxic to the body. There was hinted here a whole new world of therapy. Terry explained it to Martin, and invited him
to collaborate. Buoyant with great things they got leave from Holabird--and from Joyce--and though it was winter they went off to Birdies' Rest,
in the Vermont hills. While they snowshoed and shot rabbits, and all the long dark evenings while they lay on their bellies before the fire, they
ranted and planned.

Martin had not been so long silk-wrapped that he could not enjoy gobbling salt pork after the northwest wind and the snow. It was not unpleasant
to be free of thinking up new compliments for Joyce.

They had, they saw, to answer an interesting question: Do the quinine derivatives act by attaching themselves to the bacteria, or by changing the
body fluids? It was a simple, clear, definite question which required for answer only the inmost knowledge of chemistry and biology, a few
hundred animals on which to experiment, and perhaps ten or twenty or a million years of trying and failing.

They decided to work with the pneumococcus, and with the animal which should most nearly reproduce human pneumonia. This meant the monkey, and to
murder monkeys is expensive and rather grim. Holabird, as Director, could supply them, but if they took him into confidence he would demand
immediate results.

Terry meditated, "'Member there was one of these Nobel-prize winners, Slim, one of these plumb fanatics that instead of blowing in the prize
spent the whole thing on chimps and other apes, and he got together with another of those whiskery old birds, and they ducked up alleys and kept
the anti-viv folks from prosecuting them, and settled the problem of the transfer of syphilis to lower animals? But we haven't got any Nobel
Prize, I grieve to tell you, and it doesn't look to me--"

"Terry, I'll do it, if necessary! I've never sponged on Joyce yet, but I will now, if the Holy Wren holds out on us."


II


They faced Holabird in his office, sulkily, rather childishly, and they demanded the expenditure of at least ten thousand dollars for monkeys.
They wished to start a research which might take two years without apparent results--possibly without any results. Terry was to be transferred to
Martin's department as co-head, their combined salaries shared equally.

Then they prepared to fight.

Holabird stared, assembled his mustache, departed from his Diligent Director manner, and spoke:

"Wait a minute, if you don't mind. As I gather it, you are explaining to me that occasionally it's necessary to take some time to elaborate an
experiment. I really must tell you that I was formerly a researcher in an Institute called McGurk, and learned several of these things all by
myself! Hell, Terry, and you, Mart, don't be so egotistic! You're not the only scientists who like to work undisturbed! If you poor fish only
knew how I long to get away from signing letters and get my fingers on a kymograph drum again! Those beautiful long hours of search for truth!
And if you knew how I've fought the Trustees for the chance to keep you fellows free! All right. You shall have your monkeys. Fix up the joint
department to suit yourselves. And work ahead as seems best. I doubt if in the whole scientific world there's two people that can be trusted as
much as you two surly birds!"

Holabird rose, straight and handsome and cordial, his hand out. They sheepishly shook it and sneaked away, Terry grumbling, "He's spoiled my
whole day! I haven't got a single thing to kick about! Slim, where's the catch? You can bet there is one--there always is!"

In a year of divine work, the catch did not appear. They had their monkeys, their laboratories and garcons, and their unbroken leisure; they
began the most exciting work they had ever known, and decidedly the most nerve-jabbing. Monkeys are unreasonable animals; they delight in
developing tuberculosis on no provocation whatever; in captivity they have a liking for epidemics; and they make scenes by cursing at their
masters in seven dialects.

"They're so up-and-coming," sighed Terry. "I feel like lettin' 'em go and retiring to Birdies' Rest to grow potatoes. Why should we murder live-
wires like them to save pasty-faced, big-bellied humans from pneumonia?"

Their first task was to determine with accuracy the tolerated dose of the quinine derivative, and to study its effects on the hearing and vision,
and on the kidneys, as shown by endless determinations of blood sugar and blood urea. While Martin did the injections and observed the effect on
the monkeys and lost himself in chemistry, Terry toiled (all night, all next day, then a drink and a frowsy nap and all night again) on new
methods of synthesizing the quinine derivative.

This was the most difficult period of Martin's life. To work, staggering sleepy, all night, to drowse on a bare table at dawn and to breakfast at
a greasy lunch-counter, these were natural and amusing, but to explain to Joyce why he had missed her dinner to a lady sculptor and a lawyer
whose grandfather had been a Confederate General, this was impossible. He won a brief tolerance by explaining that he really had longed to kiss
her good-night, that he did appreciate the basket of sandwiches which she had sent, and that he was about to remove pneumonia from the human
race, a statement which he healthily doubted.

But when he had missed four dinners in succession; when she had raged, "Can you imagine how awful it was for Mrs. Thorn to be short a man at the
last moment?" when she had wailed, "I didn't so much mind your rudeness on the other nights, but this evening, when I had nothing to do and sat
home alone and waited for you"--then he writhed.

Martin and Terry began to produce pneumonia in their monkeys and to treat them, and they had success which caused them to waltz solemnly down the
corridor. They could save the monkeys from pneumonia invariably, when the infection had gone but one day, and most of them on the second day and
the third.

Their results were complicated by the fact that a certain number of monkeys recovered by themselves, and this they allowed for by simple-looking
figures which took days of stiff, shoulder-aching sitting over papers . . . one wild-haired collarless man at a table, while the other walked
among stinking cages of monkeys, clucking to them, calling them Bess and Rover, and grunting placidly, "Oh, you would bite me, would you,
sweetheart!" and all the while, kindly but merciless as the gods, injecting them with the deadly pneumonia.

They came into a high upland where the air was thin with failures. They studied in the test-tube the break-down products of pneumococci--and
failed. They constructed artificial body fluids (carefully, painfully, inadequately), they tried the effect of the derivative on germs in this
artificial blood--and failed.

Then Holabird heard of their previous success, and came down on them with laurels and fury.

He understood, he said, that they had a cure for pneumonia. Very well! The Institute could do with the credit for curing that undesirable
disease, and Terry and Martin would kindly publish their findings (mentioning McGurk) at once.

"We will not! Look here, Holabird!" snarled Terry, "I thought you were going to let us alone!"

"I have! Nearly a year! Till you should complete your research. And now you've completed it. It's time to let the world know what you're doing."

"If I did, the world would know a doggone sight more'n I do! Nothing doing, Chief. Maybe we can publish, in a year from now."

"You'll publish now or--"

"All right, Holy. The blessed moment has arrived. I quit! And I'm so gentlemanly that I do it without telling you what I think of you!"

Thus was Terry Wickett discharged from McGurk. He patented the process of synthesizing his quinine derivative and retired to Birdies' Rest, to
build a laboratory out of his small savings and spend a life of independent research supported by a restricted sale of sera and of his drug.

For Terry, wifeless and valetless, this was easy enough, but for Martin it was not simple.


III


Martin assumed that he would resign. He explained it to Joyce. How he was to combine a town house and a Greenwich castle with flannel-shirt
collaboration at Birdies' Rest he had not quite planned, but he was not going to be disloyal.

"Can you beat it! The Holy Wren fires Terry but doesn't dare touch me! I waited simply because I wanted to watch Holabird figure out what I'd do.
And now--"

He was elucidating it to her in their--in her--car, on the way home from a dinner at which he had been so gaily charming to an important dowager
that Joyce had crooned, "What a fool Latham Ireland was to say he couldn't be polite!"

"I'm free, by thunder at last I'm free, because I've worked up to something that's worth being free for!" he exulted.

She laid her fine hand on his, and begged, "Wait! I want to think. Please! Do be quiet for a moment."

Then: "Mart, if you went on working with Mr. Wickett, you'd have to be leaving me constantly."

"Well--"

"I really don't think that would be quite nice--I mean especially now, because I fancy I'm going to have a baby."

He made a sound of surprise.

"Oh, I'm not going to do the weeping mother. And I don't know whether I'm glad or furious, though I do believe I'd like to have one baby. But it
does complicate things, you know. And personally, I should be sorry if you left the Institute, which gives you a solid position, for a hole-and-
corner existence. Dear, I have been fairly nice, haven't I? I really do like you, you know! I don't want you to desert me, and you would if you
went off to this horrid Vermont place."

"Couldn't we get a little house near there, and spend part of the year?"

"Pos-sibly. But we ought to wait till this beastly job of bearing a Dear Little One is over, then think about it."

Martin did not resign from the Institute, and Joyce did not think about taking a house near Birdies' Rest to the extent of doing it.




Chapter 39



With Terry Wickett gone, Martin returned to phage. He made a false start and did the worst work of his life. He had lost his fierce serenity. He
was too conscious of the ordeal of a professional social life, and he could never understand that esoteric phenomenon, the dinner-party--the
painful entertainment of people whom one neither likes nor finds interesting.

So long as he had had a refuge in talking to Terry, he had not been too irritated by well-dressed nonentities, and for a time he had enjoyed the
dramatic game of making Nice People accept him. Now he was disturbed by reason.

Clif Clawson showed him how tangled his life had grown.

When he had first come to New York, Martin had looked for Clif, whose boisterousness had been his comfort among Angus Duers and Irving Watterses
in medical school. Clif was not to be found, neither at the motor agency for which he had once worked nor elsewhere on Automobile Row. For
fourteen years Martin had not seen him.

Then to his laboratory at McGurk was brought a black-and-red card:


CLIFFORD L. CLAWSON (Clif) TOP NOTCH GUARANTEED OIL INVESTMENTS

Higham Block Butte


"Clif! Good old Clif! The best friend a man ever had! That time he lent me the money to get to Leora! Old Clif! By golly I need somebody like
him, with Terry out of it and all these tea-hounds around me!" exulted Martin.

He dashed out and stopped abruptly, staring at a man who was, not softly, remarking to the girl reception-clerk:

"Well, sister, you scientific birds certainly do lay on the agony! Never struck a sweller layout than you got here, except in crook investment-
offices--and I've never seen a nicer cutie than you anywhere. How 'bout lil dinner one of these beauteous evenings? I expect I'll parley-vous
with thou full often now--I'm a great friend of Doc Arrowsmith. Fact I'm a doc myself--honest--real sawbones--went to medic school and
everything. Ah! HERE'S the boy!"

Martin had not allowed for the changes of fourteen years. He was dismayed.

Clif Clawson, at forty, was gross. His face was sweaty, and puffy with pale flesh; his voice was raw; he fancied checked Norfolk jackets, tight
across his swollen shoulders and his beefy hips.

He bellowed, while he belabored Martin's back:

"Well, well, well, well, well, well! Old Mart! Why, you old son of a gun! Why, you old son of a gun! Why, you damn' old chicken-thief! Say you
skinny little runt, I'm a son of a gun if you look one day older'n when I saw you last in Zenith!"

Martin was aware of the bright leering of the once humble reception-clerk. He said, "Well, gosh, it certainly is good to see you," and hastened
to get Clif into the privacy of his office.

"You look fine," he lied, when they were safe. "What you been doing with yourself? Leora and I did our best to look you up, when we first came to
New York. Uh-- Do you know about, uh, about her?"

"Yuh, I read about her passing away. Fierce luck. And about your swell work in the West Indies--where was it? I guess you're a great man now--
famous plague-chaser and all that stuff, and world-renowned skee-entist. I don't suppose you remember your old friends now."

"Oh, don't be a chump! It's--it's--it's fine to see you."

"Well, I'm glad to observe you haven't got the capitus enlargatus, Mart. Golly, I says to meself says I, if I blew in and old Mart high-hatted
me, I'd just about come nigh unto letting him hear the straight truth, after all the compliments he's been getting from the sassiety dames. I'm
glad you've kept your head. I thought about writing you from Butte--been selling some bum oil-stock there and kind of got out quick to save the
inspectors the trouble of looking over my books. 'Well,' I thought, 'I'll just sit down and write the whey-faced runt a letter, and make him feel
good by telling him how tickled I am over his nice work.' But you know how it is--time kind of slips by. Well, this is excellentus! We'll have a
chance to see a whole lot of each other now. I'm going in with a fellow on an investment stunt here in New York. Great pickings, old kid! I'll
take you out and show you how to order a real feed, one of these days. Well, tell me what you been doing since you got back from the West Indies.
I suppose you're laying your plans to try and get in as the boss or president or whatever they call it of this gecelebrated Institute."

"No--I, uh, well, I shouldn't much care to be Director. I prefer sticking to my lab. I-- Perhaps you'd like to hear about my work on phage."

Rejoicing to discover something of which he could talk, Martin sketched his experiments.

Clif spanked his forehead with a spongy hand and shouted:

"Wait! Say, I've got an idea--and you can come right in on it. As I apperceive it, the dear old Gen. Public is just beginning to hear about this
bac--what is it?--bacteriophage junk. Look here! Remember that old scoundrel Benoni Carr, that I introduced as a great pharmacologist at the
medical banquet? Had din-din with him last eventide. He's running a sanitarium out on Long Island--slick idea, too--practically he's a
bootlegger; gets a lot of high-rollers out there and let's 'em have all the hooch they want, on prescriptions, absolutely legal and water-tight!
The parties they throw at that joint, dames and everything! Believe me, Uncle Clif is sore stricken with tootelus bootelus and is going to the
Carr Sanitarium for what ails him! But now look: Suppose we got him or somebody to rig up a new kind of cure--call it phageotherapy--oh, it takes
Uncle Clif to invent the names that claw in the bounteous dollars! Patients sit in a steam cabinet and eat tablets made of phage, with just a
little strychnin to jazz up their hearts! Bran-new! Million in it! What-cha-think?"

Martin was almost feeble. "No. I'm afraid I'm against it."

"Why?"

"Well, I-- Honestly, Clif, if you don't understand it, I don't know how I can explain the scientific attitude to you. You know--that's what
Gottlieb used to call it--scientific attitude. And as I'm a scientist--least I hope I am--I couldn't-- Well, to be associated with a thing like
that--"

"But, you poor louse, don't you suppose I understand the scientific attitude? Gosh, I've seen a dissecting-room myself! Why, you poor crab, of
course I wouldn't expect you to have your name associated with it! You'd keep in the background and slip us all the dope, and get a lot of
publicity for phage in general so the Dee-ah People would fall easier, and we'd pull all the strong-arm work."

"But-- I hope you're joking, Clif. If you weren't joking, I'd tell you that if anybody tried to pull a thing like that, I'd expose 'em and get
'em sent to jail, no matter who they were!"

"Well, gosh, if you feel that way about it--!"

Clif was peering over the fatty pads beneath his eyes. He sounded doubtful:

"I suppose you have the right to keep other guys from grabbing your own stuff. Well, all right, Mart. Got to be teloddeling. Tell you what you
MIGHT do, though, if that don't hurt your tender conscience, too: you might invite old Clif up t' the house for dinner, to meet the new lil wifey
that I read about in the sassiety journals. You might happen to remember, old bean, that there have been times when you were glad enough to let
poor fat old Clif slip you a feed and a place to sleep!"

"Oh, I know. You bet there have! Nobody was ever decenter to me; nobody. Look. Where you staying? I'll find out from my wife what dates we have
ahead, and telephone you tomorrow morning."

"So you let the Old Woman keep the work-sheet for you, huh? Well, I never butt into anybody's business. I'm staying at the Berrington Hotel, room
617--'member that, 617--and you might try and 'phone me before ten tomorrow. Say, that's one grand sweet song of a cutie you got on the door
here. What cha think? How's chances on dragging her out to feed and shake a hoof with Uncle Clif?"

As primly as the oldest, most staid scientist in the Institute, Martin protested, "Oh, she belongs to very nice family. I don't think I should
try it. Really, I'd rather you didn't."

Clif's gaze was sharp, for all its fattiness.

With excessive cordiality, with excessive applause when Clif remarked, "You better go back to work and put some salt on a coupla bacteria's
tails," Martin guided him to the reception-room, safely past the girl clerk, and to the elevator.

For a long time he sat in his office and was thoroughly wretched.

He had for years pictured Clif Clawson as another Terry Wickett. He saw that Clif was as different from Terry as from Rippleton Holabird. Terry
was rough, he was surly, he was colloquial, he despised many fine and gracious things, he offended many fine and gracious people, but these
acerbities made up the haircloth robe wherewith he defended a devotion to such holy work as no cowled monk ever knew. But Clif--

"I'd do the world a service by killing that man!" Martin fretted. "Phageotherapy at a yegg sanitarium! I stand him only because I'm too much of a
coward to risk his going around saying that 'in the days of my Success, I've gone back on my old friends.' (Success! Puddling at work! Dinners!
Talking to idiotic women! Being furious because you weren't invited to the dinner to the Portuguese minister!) No. I'll 'phone Clif we can't have
him at the house."

Over him came remembrance of Clif's loyalty in the old barren days, and Clif's joy to share with him every pathetic gain.

"Why SHOULD he understand my feeling about phage? Was his scheme any worse than plenty of reputable drug-firms? How much was I righteously
offended, and how much was I sore because he didn't recognize the high social position of the rich Dr. Arrowsmith?"

He gave up the question, went home, explained almost frankly to Joyce what her probable opinion of Clif would be, and contrived that Clif should
be invited to dinner with only the two of them.

"My dear Mart," said Joyce, "why do you insult me by hinting that I'm such a snob that I'll be offended by racy slang and by business ethics very
much like those of dear Roger's grandpapa? Do you think I've never ventured out of the drawing-room? I thought you'd seen me outside it! I shall
probably like your Clawson person very much indeed."

The day after Martin had invited him to dinner, Clif telephoned to Joyce:

"This Mrs. Arrowsmith? Well, say, this is old Clif."

"I'm afraid I didn't quite catch it."

"Clif! Old Clif!"

"I'm frightfully sorry but-- Perhaps there's a bad connection."

"Why, it's Mr. CLAWSON, that's going to feed with you on--"

"Oh, of course. I AM so sorry."

"Well, look: What I wanted to know is: Is this going to be just a homey grub-grabbing or a real soiree? In other words, honey, shall I dress
natural or do I put on the soup-and-fish? Oh, I got 'em--swallowtail and the whole darn' outfit!"

"I-- Do you mean-- Oh. Shall you dress for dinner? I think perhaps I would."

"Attaboy! I'll be there, dolled up like a new saloon. I'll show you folks the cutest lil line of jeweled studs you ever laid eyes on. Well, it's
been a great pleezhure to meet Mart's Missus, and we will now close with singing 'Till We Meet Again' or 'Au Reservoir.'"

When Martin came home, Joyce faced him with, "Sweet, I can't do it! The man must be mad. Really, dear, you just take care of him and let me go to
bed. Besides: you two won't want me--you'll want to talk over old times, and I'd only interfere. And with baby coming in two months now, I ought
to go to bed early."

"Oh, Joy, Clif'd be awfully offended, and he's always been so decent to me and-- And you've often asked me about my cub days. Don't you WANT,"
plaintively, "to hear about 'em?"

"Very well, dear. I'll try to be a little sunbeam to him, but I warn you I sha'n't be a success."

They worked themselves up to a belief that Clif would be raucous, would drink too much, and slap Joyce on the back. But when he appeared for
dinner he was agonizingly polite and flowery--till he became slightly drunk. When Martin said "damn," Clif reproved him with, "Of course I'm only
a hick, but I don't think a lady like the Princess here would like you to cuss."

And, "Well, I never expected a rube like young Mart to marry the real bon-ton article."

And, "Oh, maybe it didn't cost something to furnish this dining-room, oh, not a-tall!"

And, "Champagne, heh? Well, you're certainly doing poor old Clif proud. Your Majesty, just tell your High Dingbat to tell his valay to tell my
secretary the address of your bootlegger, will you?"

In his cups, though he severely retained his moral and elegant vocabulary, Clif chronicled the jest of selling oil-wells unprovided with oil and
of escaping before the law closed in; the cleverness of joining churches for the purpose of selling stock to the members; and the edifying
experience of assisting Dr. Benoni Carr to capture a rich and senile widow for his sanitarium by promising to provide medical consultation from
the spirit-world.

Joyce was silent through it all, and so superbly polite that everyone was wretched.

Martin struggled to make a liaison between them, and he had no elevating remarks about the strangeness of a man's boasting of his own
crookedness, but he was coldly furious when Clif blundered:

"You said old Gottlieb was sort of down on his luck now."

"Yes, he's not very well."

"Poor old coot. But I guess you've realized by now how foolish you were when you used to fall for him like seven and a half brick. Honestly, Lady
Arrowsmith, this kid used to think Pa Gottlieb was the cat's pajamas--begging your pardon for the slanguageness."

"What do you mean?" said Martin.

"Oh, I'm onto Gottlieb! Of course you know as well as I do that he always was a self-advertiser, getting himself talked about by confidin' to the
whole ops terrara what a strict scientist he was, and putting on a lot of dog and emitting these wise cracks about philosophy and what fierce
guys the regular docs were. But what's worse than-- Out in San Diego I ran onto a fellow that used to be an instructor in botany in Winnemac, and
he told me that with all this antibody stuff of his, Gottlieb never gave any credit to--well, he was some Russian that did most of it before and
Pa Gottlieb stole all his stuff."

That in this charge against Gottlieb there was a hint of truth, that he knew the great god to have been at times ungenerous, merely increased the
rage which was clenching Martin's fist in his lap.

Three years before, he would have thrown something, but he was an adaptable person. He had yielded to Joyce's training in being quietly instead
of noisily disagreeable; and his only comment was "No, I think you're wrong, Clif. Gottlieb has carried the antibody work 'way beyond all the
others."

Before the coffee and liqueurs had come into the drawing-room, Joyce begged, at her prettiest, "Mr. Clawson, do you mind awfully if I slip up to
bed? I'm so frightfully glad to have had the opportunity of meeting one of my husband's oldest friends, but I'm not feeling very well, and I do
think I'd be wise to have some rest."

"Madam the Princess, I noticed you were looking peeked."

"Oh! Well-- Good-night!"

Martin and Clif settled in large chairs in the drawing-room, and tried to play at being old friends happy in meeting. They did not look at each
other.

After Clif had cursed a little and told three sound smutty stories, to show that he had not been spoiled and that he had been elegant only to
delight Joyce, he flung:

"Huh! So that is that, as the Englishers remark. Well, I could see your Old Lady didn't cotton to me. She was just as chummy as an iceberg. But
gosh, I don't mind. She's going to have a kid, and of course women, all of 'em, get cranky when they're that way. But--"

He hiccuped, looked sage, and bolted his fifth cognac.

"But what I never could figure out-- Mind you, I'm not criticizing the Old Lady. She's as swell as they make 'em. But what I can't understand is
how after living with Leora, who was the real thing, you can stand a hoity-toity skirt like Joycey!"

Then Martin broke.

The misery of not being able to work, these months since Terry had gone, had gnawed at him.

"Look here, Clif. I won't have you discuss my wife. I'm sorry she doesn't please you, but I'm afraid that in this particular matter--"

Clif had risen, not too steadily, though his voice and his eyes were resolute.

"All right. I figured out you were going to high-hat me. Of course I haven't got a rich wife to slip me money. I'm just a plain old hobo. I don't
belong in a place like this. Not smooth enough to be a butler. You are. All right. I wish you luck. And meanwhile you can go plumb to hell, my
young friend!"

Martin did not pursue him into the hall.

As he sat alone he groaned, "Thank Heaven, that operation's over!"

He told himself that Clif was a crook, a fool, and a fat waster; he told himself that Clif was a cynic without wisdom, a drunkard without charm,
and a philanthropist who was generous only because it larded his vanity. But these admirable truths did not keep the operation from hurting any
more than it would have eased the removal of an appendix to be told that it was a bad appendix, an appendix without delicacy or value.

He had loved Clif--did love him and always would. But he would never see him again. Never!

The impertinence of that flabby blackguard to sneer at Gottlieb! His boorishness! Life was too short for--

"But hang it--yes, Clif is a tough, but so am I. He's a crook, but wasn't I a crook to fake my plague figures in St. Hubert--and the worse crook
because I got praise for it?"

He bobbed up to Joyce's room. She was lying in her immense four-poster, reading "Peter Whiffle."

"Darling, it was all rather dreadful, wasn't it!" she said. "He's gone?"

"Yes. . . . He's gone. . . . I've driven out the best friend I ever had--practically. I let him go, let him go off feeling that he was a rotter
and a failure. It would have been decenter to have killed him. Oh, why couldn't you have been simple and jolly with him? You were so confoundedly
polite! He was uneasy and unnatural, and showed up worse than he really is. He's no tougher than--he's a lot better than the financiers who cover
up their stuff by being suave. . . . Poor devil! I'll bet right now Clif's tramping in the rain, saying, 'The one man I ever loved and tried to
do things for has turned against me, now he's--now he has a lovely wife. What's the use of ever being decent?' he's saying. . . . Why couldn't
you be simple and chuck your high-falutin' manners for once?"

"See here! You disliked him quite as much as I did, and I will not have you blame it on me! You've grown beyond him. You that are always blaring
about Facts--can't you face the fact? For once, at least, it's not my fault. You may perhaps remember, my king of men, that I had the good sense
to suggest that I shouldn't appear tonight; not meet him at all."

"Oh--well--yes--gosh--but-- Oh, I suppose so. Well, anyway--It's over, and that's all there is to it."

"Darling, I do understand how you feel. But isn't it good it is over! Kiss me good-night."

"BUT"--Martin said to himself, as he sat feeling naked and lost and homeless, in the dressing-gown of gold dragon-flies on black silk which she
had bought for him in Paris--"but if it'd been Leora instead of Joyce--Leora would've known Clif was a crook, and she'd've accepted it as a fact.
(Talk about your facing facts!) She wouldn't've insisted on sitting as a judge. She wouldn't've said, 'This is different from me, so it's wrong.'
She'd've said, 'This is different from me, so it's interesting.' Leora--"

He had a sharp, terrifying vision of her, lying there coffinless, below the mold in a garden on the Penrith Hills.

He came out of it to growl, "What was it Clif said? 'You're not her husband--you're her butler--you're too smooth.' He was right! The whole point
is: I'm not allowed to see who I want to. I've been so clever that I've made myself the slave of Joyce and Holy Holabird."

He was always going to, but he never did see Clif Clawson again.


II


It happened that both Joyce's and Martin's paternal grandfathers had been named John, and John Arrowsmith they called their son. They did not
know it, but a certain John Arrowsmith, mariner of Bideford, had died in the matter of the Spanish Armada, taking with him five valorous Dons.

Joyce suffered horribly, and renewed all of Martin's love for her (he did love pitifully this slim, brilliant girl).

"Death's a better game than bridge--you have no partner to help you!" she said, when she was grotesquely stretched on a chair of torture and
indignity; when before they would give her the anesthetic, her face was green with agony.

John Arrowsmith was straight of back and straight of limb--ten good pounds he weighed at birth--and he was gay of eye when he had ceased to be a
raw wrinkled grub and become a man-child. Joyce worshiped him, and Martin was afraid of him, because he saw that this minuscule aristocrat, this
child born to the self-approval of riches, would some day condescend to him.

Three months after child-bearing, Joyce was more brisk than ever about putting and back-hand service and hats and Russian emigres.


III


For science Joyce had great respect and no understanding. Often she asked Martin to explain his work, but when he was glowing, making diagrams
with his thumb-nail on the tablecloth, she would interrupt him with a gracious "Darling--do you mind--just a second--Plinder, isn't there any
more of the sherry?"

When she turned back to him, though her eyes were kind his enthusiasm was gone.

She came to his laboratory, asked to see his flasks and tubes, and begged him to bully her into understanding, but she never sat back watching
for silent hours.

Suddenly, in his bogged floundering in the laboratory, he touched solid earth. He blundered into the effect of phage on the mutation of bacterial
species--very beautiful, very delicate--and after plodding months when he had been a sane citizen, an almost good husband, an excellent bridge-
player, and a rotten workman, he knew again the happiness of high taut insanity.

He wanted to work nights, every night. During his uninspired fumbling, there had been nothing to hold him at the Institute after five, and Joyce
had become used to having him flee to her. Now he showed an inconvenient ability to ignore engagements, to snap at delightful guests who asked
him to explain all about science, to forget even her and the baby.

"I've GOT to work evenings!" he said. "I can't be regular and easy about it when I'm caught by a big experiment, any more than you could be
regular and easy and polite when you were gestating the baby."

"I know but-- Darling, you get so nervous when you're working like this. Heavens, I don't care how much you offend people by missing engagements-
-well, after all, I wish you wouldn't, but I do know it may be unavoidable. But when you make yourself so drawn and trembly, are you gaining time
in the long run? It's just for your own sake. Oh, I have it! Wait! You'll see what a scientist I am! No, I won't explain--not yet!"

Joyce had wealth and energy. A week later, flushed, slim, gallant, joyous, she said to him after dinner, "I've got a surprise for you!"

She led him to the unoccupied rooms over the garage, behind their house. In that week, using a score of workmen from the most immaculate and
elaborate scientific supply-house in the country, she had created for him the best bacteriological laboratory he had ever seen--white-tile floor
and enameled brick walls, ice-box and incubator, glassware and stains and microscope, a perfect constant-temperature bath--and a technician,
trained in Lister and Rockefeller, who had his bedroom behind the laboratory and who announced his readiness to serve Dr. Arrowsmith day or
night.

"There!" sang Joyce. "Now when you simply must work evenings, you won't have to go clear down to Liberty Street. You can duplicate your cultures
or whatever you call 'em. If you're bored at dinner--all right! You can slip out here afterward and work as late as ever you want. Is-- Sweet, is
it all right? Have I done it right? I tried so hard--I got the best men I could--"

While his lips were against hers he brooded, "To have done this for me! And to be so humble! . . . And now, curse it, I'll NEVER be able to get
away by myself!"

She so joyfully demanded his finding some fault that, to give her the novel pleasure of being meek, he suggested that the centrifuge was
inadequate.

"You wait, my man!" she crowed.

Two evenings after, when they had returned from the opera, she led him to the cement-floored garage beneath his new laboratory, and in a corner,
ready to be set up, was a secondhand but adequate centrifuge, a most adequate centrifuge, the masterpiece of the great firm of Berkeley-Saunders-
-in fact none other than Gladys, whose dismissal from McGurk for her sluttish ways had stirred Martin and Terry to go out and get bountifully
drunk.

It was less easy for him, this time, to be grateful, but he worked at it.


IV


Through both the economico-literary and the Rolls-Royce section of Joyce's set the rumor panted that there was a new diversion in an exhausted
world--going out to Martin's laboratory and watching him work, and being ever so silent and reverent, except perhaps when Joyce murmured, "Isn't
he adorable the way he teaches his darling bacteria to say 'Pretty Polly'!" or when Latham Ireland convulsed them by arguing that scientists had
no sense of humor, or Sammy de Lembre burst out in his marvelous burlesque of jazz:


Oh, Mistah Back-sil-lil-us, don't you gri-in at me; You mi-cro-bi-o-log-ic cuss, I'm o-on-to thee. When Mr. Dr. Arrowsmith's done looked at de
clues, You'll sit in jail a-singin' dem Bac-ter-i-uh Blues.


Joyce's cousin from Georgia sparkled, "Mart is so cute with all those lil vases of his. But Ah can always get him so mad by tellin' him the
trouble with HIM is, he don't go to church often enough!"

While Martin sought to concentrate.

They flocked from the house to his laboratory only once a week, which was certainly not enough to disturb a resolute man--merely enough to keep
him constantly waiting for them.

When he sedately tried to explain this and that to Joyce, she said, "Did we bother you this evening? But they do admire you so."

He remarked, "Well," and went to bed.


V


R. A. Hopburn, the eminent patent-lawyer, as he drove away from the Arrowsmith-Lanyon mansion grunted at his wife:

"I don't mind a host throwing the port at you, if he thinks you're a chump, but I do mind his being bored at your daring to express any opinion
whatever. . . . Didn't he look silly, out in his idiotic laboratory! . . . How the deuce do you suppose Joyce ever came to marry him?"

"I can't imagine."

"I can only think of one reason. Of course she may--"

"Now please don't be filthy!"

"Well, anyway-- She who might have picked any number of well-bred, agreeable, intelligent chaps--and I MEAN intelligent, because this Arrowsmith
person may know all about germs, but he doesn't know a symphony from a savory. . . . I don't think I'm too fussy, but I don't quite see why we
should go to a house where the host apparently enjoys flatly contradicting you. . . . Poor devil, I'm really sorry for him; probably he doesn't
even know when he's being rude."

"No. Perhaps. What hurts is to think of old Roger--so gay, so strong, real Skull and Bones--and to have this abrupt Outsider from the tall grass
sitting in his chair, failing to appreciate his Pol Roger-- What Joyce ever saw in him! Though he does have nice eyes and such funny strong
hands--"


VI


Joyce's busyness was on his nerves. Why she was so busy it was hard to ascertain; she had an excellent housekeeper, a noble butler, and two
nurses for the baby. But she often said that she was never allowed to attain her one ambition: to sit and read.

Terry had once caller her The Arranger, and though Martin resented it, when he heard the telephone bell he groaned, "Oh, Lord, there's The
Arranger--wants me to come to tea with some high-minded hen."

When he sought to explain that he must be free from entanglements, she suggested, "Are you such a weak, irresolute, LITTLE man that the only way
you can keep concentrated is by running away? Are you afraid of the big men who can do big work, and still stop and play?"

He was likely to turn abusive, particularly as to her definition of Big Men, and when he became hot and vulgar, she turned grande dame, so that
he felt like an impertinent servant and was the more vulgar.

He was afraid of her then. He imagined fleeing to Leora, and the two of them, frightened little people, comforting each other and hiding from her
in snug corners.

But often enough Joyce was his companion, seeking new amusements as surprises for him, and in their son they had a binding pride. He sat watching
little John, rejoicing in his strength.

It was in early winter, after she had royally taken the baby South for a fortnight, that Martin escaped for a week with Terry at Birdies' Rest.

He found Terry tired and a little surly, after months of working absolutely alone. He had constructed beside the home cabin a shanty for
laboratory, and a rough stable for the horses which he used in the preparation of his sera. Terry did not, as once he would have, flare into the
details of his research, and not till evening, when they smoked before the rough fireplace of the cabin, loafing in chairs made of barrels
cushioned with elk skin, could Martin coax him into confidences.

He had been compelled to give up much of his time to mere housework and the production of the sera which paid his expenses. "If you'd only been
with me, I could have accomplished something." But his quinine derivative research had gone on solidly, and he did not regret leaving McGurk. He
had found it impossible to work with monkeys; they were too expensive and too fragile to stand the Vermont winter; but he had contrived a method
of using mice infected with pneumococcus and--

"Oh, what's the use of my telling you this, Slim? You're not interested, or you'd have been up here at work with me, months ago. You've chosen
between Joyce and me. All right, but you can't have both."

Martin snarled, "I'm very sorry I intruded on you, Wickett," and slammed out of the cabin. Stumbling through the snow, blundering in darkness
against stumps, he knew the agony of his last hour, the hour of failure.

"I've lost Terry, now (though I won't stand his impertinence!). I've lost everybody, and I've never really had Joyce. I'm completely alone. And I
can only half work! I'm through! They'll never let me get to work again!"

Suddenly, without arguing it out, he knew that he was not going to give up.

He floundered back to the cabin and burst in, crying, "You old grouch, we got to stick together!"

Terry was as much moved as he; neither of them was far from tears; and as they roughly patted each other's shoulders they growled, "Fine pair of
fools, scrapping just because we're tired!"

"I will come and work with you, somehow!" Martin swore. "I'll get a six months' leave from the Institute, and have Joyce stay at some hotel near
here, or do SOMEthing. Gee! Back to real work. . . . WORK! . . . Now tell me: When I come up here, what d'you say we--"

They talked till dawn.




Chapter 40



Dr. and Mrs. Rippleton Holabird had invited only Joyce and Martin to dinner. Holabird was his most charming self. He admired Joyce's pearls, and
when the squabs had been served he turned on Martin with friendly intensity:

"Now will Joyce and you listen to me most particularly? Things are happening, Martin, and I want you--no, Science wants you!--to take your proper
part in them. I needn't, by the way, hint that this is absolutely confidential. Dr. Tubbs and his League of Cultural Agencies are beginning to
accomplish marvels, and Colonel Minnigen has been extraordinarily liberal.

"They've gone at the League with exactly the sort of thoroughness and taking-it-slow that you and dear old Gottlieb have always insisted on. For
four years now they've stuck to making plans. I happen to know that Dr. Tubbs and the council of the League have had the most wonderful
conferences with college-presidents and editors and clubwomen and labor-leaders (the sound, sensible ones, of course) and efficiency-experts and
the more advanced advertising-men and ministers, and all the other leaders of public thought.

"They've worked out elaborate charts classifying all intellectual occupations and interests, with the methods and materials and tools, and
especially the goals--the aims, the ideals, the moral purposes--that are suited to each of them. Really tremendous! Why, a musician or an
engineer, for example, could look at his chart and tell accurately whether he was progressing fast enough, at his age, and if not, just what his
trouble was, and the remedy. With this basis, the League is ready to go to work and encourage all brain-workers to affiliate.

"McGurk Institute simply must get in on this co-ordination, which I regard as one of the greatest advances in thinking that has ever been made.
We are at last going to make all the erstwhile chaotic spiritual activities of America really conform to the American ideal; we're going to make
them as practical and supreme as the manufacture of cash-registers! I have certain reasons for supposing I can bring Ross McGurk and Minnigen
together, now that the McGurk and Minnigen lumber interests have stopped warring, and if so I shall probably quit the Institute and help Tubbs
guide the League of Cultural Agencies. Then we'll need a new Director of McGurk who will work with us and help bring Science out of the monastery
to serve Mankind."

By this time Martin understood everything about the League except what the League was trying to do.

Holabird went on:

"Now I know, Martin, that you've always rather sneered at Practicalness, but I have faith in you! I believe you've been too much under the
influence of Wickett, and now that he's gone and you've seen more of life and of Joyce's set and mine, I believe I can coax you to take (oh!
without in any way neglecting the severities of your lab work!) a broader view.

"I am authorized to appoint an Assistant Director, and I think I'm safe in saying he would succeed me as full Director. Sholtheis wants the
place, and Dr. Smith and Yeo would leap at it, but I haven't yet found any of them that are quite Our Own Sort, and I offer it to you! I daresay
in a year or two, you will be Director of McGurk Institute!"

Holabird was uplifted, as one giving royal favor. Mrs. Holabird was intense, as one present on an historical occasion and Joyce was ecstatic over
the honor to her Man.

Martin stammered, "W-why, I'll have to think it over. Sort of unexpected--"

The rest of the evening Holabird so brimmingly enjoyed himself picturing an era in which Tubbs and Martin and he would rule, co-ordinate,
standardize, and make useful the whole world of intelligence, from trousers-designing to poetry, that he did not resent Martin's silence. At
parting he chanted, "Talk it over with Joyce, and let me have your decision tomorrow. By the way, I think we'll get rid of Pearl Robbins; she's
been useful but now she considers herself indispensable. But that's a detail. . . . Oh, I do have faith in you, Martin, dear old boy! You've
grown and calmed down, and you've widened your interests so much, this past year!"

In their car, in that moving curtained room under the crystal dome-light, Joyce beamed at him.

"Isn't it too wonderful, Mart! And I do feel Rippleton can bring it off. Think of your being Director, head of that whole great Institute, when
just a few years ago you were only a cub there! But haven't I perhaps helped, just a little?"

Suddenly Martin hated the blue-and-gold velvet of the car, the cunningly hid gold box of cigarettes, all this soft and smothering prison. He
wanted to be out beside the unseen chauffeur--His Own Sort!--facing the winter. He tried to look as though he were meditating, in an awed,
appreciative manner, but he was merely being cowardly, reluctant to begin the slaughter. Slowly:

"Would you really like to see me Director?"

"Of course! All that--Oh, you know; I don't just mean the prominence and respect, but the power to accomplish good."

"Would you like to see me dictating letters, giving out interviews, buying linoleum, having lunch with distinguished fools, advising men about
whose work I don't know a blame' thing?"

"Oh, don't be so superior! Someone has to do these things. And that'd be only a small part of it. Think of the opportunity of encouraging some
youngster who wanted a chance to do splendid science!"

"And give up my own chance?"

"Why need you? You'd be head of your own department just the same. And even if you did give up-- You are so stubborn! It's lack of imagination.
You think that because you've started in on one tiny branch of mental activity, there's nothing else in the world. It's just as when I persuaded
you that if you got out of your stinking laboratory once a week or so, and actually bent your powerful intellect to a game of golf, the world of
science wouldn't immediately stop! No imagination! You're precisely like these business men you're always cursing because they can't see anything
in life beyond their soap-factories or their banks!"

"And you really would have me give up my work--"

He saw that with all her eager complaisances she had never understood what he was up to, had not comprehended one word about the murderous effect
of the directorship on Gottlieb.

He was silent again, and before they reached home she said only, "You know I'm the last person to speak of money, but really, it's you who have
so often brought up the matter of hating to be dependent on me, and you know as Director you would make so much more that-- Forgive me!"

She fled before him into her palace, into the automatic elevator.

He plodded up the stairs, grumbling, "Yes, it is the first chance I've had to really contribute to the expenses here. Sure! Willing to take her
money, but not to do anything in return, and then call it 'devotion to science!' Well, I've got to decide right now--"

He did not go through the turmoil of deciding; he leaped to decision without it. He marched into Joyce's room, irritated by its snobbishness of
discreet color. He was checked by the miserable way in which she sat brooding on the edge of her day couch, but he flung:

"I'm not going to do it, even if I have to leave the Institute--and Holabird will just about make me quit. I will not get buried in this pompous
fakery of giving orders and--"

"Mart! Listen! Don't you want your son to be proud of you?"

"Um. Well-- NO, not if he's to be proud of me for being a stuffed shirt, a sideshow barker--"

"Please don't be vulgar."

"Why not? Matter of fact, I haven't been vulgar enough lately. What I ought to do is to go to Birdies' Rest right now, and work with Terry."

"I wish I had some way of showing you-- Oh, for a 'scientist' you do have the most incredible blind-spots! I wish I could make you see just how
weak and futile that is. The wilds! The simple life! The old argument. It's just the absurd, cowardly sort of thing these tired highbrows do that
sneak off to some Esoteric Colony and think they're getting strength to conquer life, when they're merely running away from it."

"No. Terry has his place in the country only because he can live cheaper there. If we--if he could afford it, he'd probably be right here, in
town, with garcons and everything, like McGurk, but with no Director Holabird, by God--and no Director Arrowsmith!"

"Merely a cursing, ill-bred, intensely selfish Director Terry Wickett!"

"Now, by God, let me tell you--"

"Martin, do you need to emphasize your arguments by a 'by God' in every sentence, or have you a few other expressions in your highly scientific
vocabulary?"

"Well, I have enough vocabulary to express the idea that I'm thinking of joining Terry."

"Look here, Mart. You feel so virtuous about wanting to go off and wear a flannel shirt and be peculiar and very, very pure. Suppose everybody
argued that way. Suppose every father deserted his children whenever his nice little soul ached? Just what would become of the world? Suppose I
were poor, and you left me, and I had to support John by taking in washing--"

"It'd probably be fine for you but fierce on the washing! No! I beg your pardon. That was an obvious answer. But-- I imagine it's just that
argument that's kept almost everybody, all these centuries, from being anything but a machine for digestion and propagation and obedience. The
answer is that very few ever do, under any condition, willingly leave a soft bed for a shanty bunk in order to be pure, as you very properly call
it, and those of us that are pioneers-- Oh, this debate could go on forever! We could prove that I'm a hero or a fool or a deserter or anything
you like, but the fact is I've suddenly seen I must go! I want my freedom to work, and I herewith quit whining about it and grab it. You've been
generous to me. I'm grateful. But you've never been mine. Good-by."

"Darling, darling-- We'll talk it over again in the morning, when you aren't so excited. . . . And an hour ago I was so proud of you!"

"All right. Good-night."

But before morning, taking two suit-cases and a bag of his roughest clothes, leaving for her a tender note which was the hardest thing he had
ever written, kissing his son and muttering, "Come to me when you grow up, old man," he went to a cheap side-street hotel. As he stretched on the
rickety iron bed, he grieved for their love. Before noon he had gone to the Institute, resigned, taken certain of his own apparatus and notes and
books and materials, refused to answer a telephone call from Joyce, and caught a train for Vermont.

Cramped on the red-plush seat of the day-coach (he who of late had ridden in silken private cars), he grinned with the joy of no longer having to
toil at dinner-parties.

He drove up to Birdies' Rest in a bob-sled. Terry was chopping wood, in a mess of chip-littered snow.

"Hello, Terry. Come for keeps."

"Fine, Slim. Say, there's a lot of dishes in the shack need washing."


II


He had become soft. To dress in the cold shanty and to wash in icy water was agony; to tramp for three hours through fluffy snow exhausted him.
But the rapture of being allowed to work twenty-four hours a day without leaving an experiment at its juiciest moment to creep home for dinner,
of plunging with Terry into arguments as cryptic as theology and furious as the indignation of a drunken man, carried him along, and he felt
himself growing sinewy. Often he meditated on yielding to Joyce so far as to allow her to build a better laboratory for them, and more civilized
quarters.

With only one servant, though, or two at the very most, and just a simple decent bathroom--

She had written, "You have been thoroughly beastly, and any attempt at reconciliation, if that is possible now, which I rather doubt, must come
from you."

He answered, describing the ringing winter woods and not mentioning the platform word Reconciliation.


III


They wanted to study further the exact mechanism of the action of their quinine derivatives. This was difficult with the mice which Terry had
contrived to use instead of monkeys, because of their size. Martin had brought with him strains of Bacillus lepisepticus, which causes a pleuro-
pneumonia in rabbits, and their first labor was to discover whether their original compound was effective against this bacillus as well as
against pneumococcus. Profanely they found that it was not; profanely and patiently they trudged into an infinitely complicated search for a
compound that should be.

They earned their living by preparing sera which rather grudgingly they sold to physicians of whose honesty they were certain, abruptly refusing
the popular drug-vendors. They thus received surprisingly large sums, and among all clever people it was believed that they were too coyly shrewd
to be sincere.

Martin worried as much over what he considered his treachery to Clif Clawson as over his desertion of Joyce and John, but this worrying he did
only when he could not sleep. Regularly, at three in the morning, he brought both Joyce and honest Clif to Birdies' Rest; and regularly, at six,
when he was frying bacon, he forgot them.

Terry the barbarian, once he was free of the tittering and success-pawing of Holabird, was an easy campmate. Upper berth or lower was the same to
him, and till Martin was hardened to cold and fatigue, Terry did more than his share of wood-cutting and supply-toting, and with great melody and
skill he washed their clothes.

He had the genius to see that they two alone, shut up together season on season, would quarrel. He planned with Martin that the laboratory scheme
should be extended to include eight (but never more!) maverick and undomestic researchers like themselves, who should contribute to the expenses
of the camp by manufacturing sera, but otherwise do their own independent work--whether it should be the structure of the atom, or a disproof of
the results of Drs. Wickett and Arrowsmith. Two rebels, a chemist now caught in a drug-firm and a university professor, were coming next autumn.

"It's kind of a mis'able return to monasteries," grumbled Terry, "except that we're not trying to solve anything for anybody but our own fool
selves. Mind you! When this place becomes a shrine, and a lot of cranks begin to creep in here, then you and I got to beat it, Slim. We'll move
farther back in the woods, or if we feel too old for that, we'll take another shot at professorships or Dawson Hunziker or even the Rev. Dr.
Holabird."

For the first time Martin's work began definitely to draw ahead of Terry's.

His mathematics and physical chemistry were now as sound as Terry's, his indifference to publicity and to flowery hangings as great, his industry
as fanatical, his ingenuity in devising new apparatus at least comparable, and his imagination far more swift. He had less ease but more passion.
He hurled out hypotheses like sparks. He began, incredulously, to comprehend his freedom. He would yet determine the essential nature of phage;
and as he became stronger and surer--and no doubt less human--he saw ahead of him innumerous inquiries into chemotherapy and immunity; enough
adventures to keep him busy for decades.

It seemed to him that this was the first spring he had ever seen and tasted. He learned to dive into the lake, though the first plunge was an
agony of fiery cold. They fished before breakfast, they supped at a table under the oaks, they tramped twenty miles on end, they had bluejays and
squirrels for interested neighbors; and when they had worked all night, they came out to find serene dawn lifting across the sleeping lake.

Martin felt sun-soaked and deep of chest, and always he hummed.

And one day he peeped out, beneath his new horn-rimmed almost-middle-aged glasses, to see a gigantic motor crawling up their woods road. From the
car, jolly and competent in tweeds, stepped Joyce.

He wanted to flee through the back door of the laboratory shanty. Reluctantly he edged out to meet her.

"It's a sweet place, really!" she said, and amiably kissed him. "Let's walk down by the lake."

In a stilly place of ripples and birch boughs, he was moved to grip her shoulders.

She cried, "Darling, I HAVE missed you! You're wrong about lots of things, but you're right about this--you must work and not be disturbed by a
lot of silly people. Do you like my tweeds? Don't they look wildernessy? You see, I've come to stay! I'll build a house near here; perhaps right
across the lake. Yes. That will make a sweet place, over there on that sort of little plateau, if I can get the land--probably some horrid tight-
fisted old farmer owns it. Can't you just SEE it: a wide low house, with enormous verandas and red awnings--"

"And visitors coming?"

"I suppose so. Sometimes. Why?"

Desperately, "Joyce, I do love you. I want awfully, just now, to kiss you properly. But I will not have you bringing a lot of people--and there'd
probably be a rotten noisy motor launch. Make our lab a joke. Roadhouse. New sensation. Why, Terry would go crazy! You ARE lovely! But you want a
playmate, and I want to work. I'm afraid you can't stay. No."

"And our son is to be left without your care?"

"He-- Would he have my care if I died? . . . He is a nice kid, too! I hope he won't be a Rich Man! . . . Perhaps ten years from now he'll come to
me here."

"And live like THIS?"

"Sure--unless I'm broke. Then he won't live so well. We have meat practically every day now!"

"I see. And suppose your Terry Wickett should marry some waitress or some incredibly stupid rustic? From what you've told me, he rather fancies
that sort of girl!"

"Well, either he and I would beat her, together, or it would be the one thing that could break me."

"Martin, aren't you perhaps a little insane?"

"Oh, absolutely! And how I enjoy it! Though you-- You look here now, Joy! We're insane but we're not cranks! Yesterday an 'esoteric healer' came
here because he thought this was a free colony, and Terry walked him twenty miles, and then I think he threw him in the lake. No. Gosh. Let me
think." He scratched his chin. "I don't believe we're insane. We're farmers."

"Martin, it's too infinitely diverting to find you becoming a fanatic, and all the while trying to wriggle out of being a fanatic. You've left
common sense. I AM common sense. I believe in bathing! Good-by!"

"Now you look here. By golly--"

She was gone, reasonable and triumphant.

As the chauffeur maneuvered among the stumps of the clearing, for a moment Joyce looked out from her car, and they stared at each other, through
tears. They had never been so frank, so pitiful, as in this one unarmored look which recalled every jest, every tenderness, every twilight they
had known together. But the car rolled on unhalted, and he remembered that he had been doing an experiment--


IV


On a certain evening of May, Congressman Almus Pickerbaugh was dining with the President of the United States.

"When the campaign is over, Doctor," said the President, "I hope we shall see you a cabinet-member--the first Secretary of Health and Eugenics in
the country!"

That evening, Dr. Rippleton Holabird was addressing a meeting of celebrated thinkers, assembled by the League of Cultural Agencies. Among the Men
of Measured Merriment on the platform were Dr. Aaron Sholtheis, the new Director of McGurk Institute, and Dr. Angus Duer, head of the Duer Clinic
and professor of surgery in Fort Dearborn Medical College.

Dr. Holabird's epochal address was being broadcast by radio to a million ardently listening lovers of science.

That evening, Bert Tozer of Wheatsylvania, North Dakota, was attending mid-week prayer-meeting. His new Buick sedan awaited him outside, and with
modest satisfaction he heard the minister gloat:

"The righteous, even the Children of Light, they shall be rewarded with a great reward and their feet shall walk in gladness, saith the Lord of
Hosts; but the mockers, the Sons of Belial, they shall be slain betimes and cast down into darkness and failure, and in the busy marts shall they
be forgot."

That evening, Max Gottlieb sat unmoving and alone, in a dark small room above the banging city street. Only his eyes were alive.

That evening, the hot breeze languished along the palm-waving ridge where the ashes of Gustaf Sondelius were lost among cinders, and a depression
in a garden marked the grave of Leora.

That evening, after an unusually gay dinner with Latham Ireland, Joyce admitted, "Yes, if I do divorce him, I may marry you. I know! He's never
going to see how egotistical it is to think he's the only man living who's always right!"

That evening, Martin Arrowsmith and Terry Wickett lolled in a clumsy boat, an extraordinarily uncomfortable boat, far out on the water.

"I feel as if I were really beginning to work now," said Martin. "This new quinine stuff may prove pretty good. We'll plug along on it for two or
three years, and maybe we'll get something permanent--and probably we'll fail!"

THE END

End of this Meredy.com E-book Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis
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Listen to the October 25, 1937 Lux Radio Theater version of Arrowsmith starring Spencer Tracy and Fay Wray.



Listen to the February 3, 1939 Campbell Playhouse version of Arrowsmith starring Orson Welles and Helen Hayes.