[CHAPTER: I, ] [ II, ] [ III, ] [ IV, ] [ V, ] [ VI, ] [ VII, ] [ VIII, ] [ IX, ] [ X, ] [ XI, ] [ XII, ] [ XIII, ] [ XIV, ] [ XV, ] [ XVI, ] [ XVII, ] [ XVIII, ] [ XIX, ] [ XX, ] [ XXI, ] [ XXII, ] [ XXIII, ] [ XXIV, ] [ XXV, ] [ XXVI, ] [ XXVII, ] [ XXVIII, ] [ XXIX, ] [ XXX, ] [ XXXI, ] [ XXXII, ] [ XXXIII, ] [ XXXIV, ] [ XXXV, ] [ XXXVI, ] [ XXXVII, ] [ XXXVIII, ] [ XXXIX, ] [ XL. ]
NOVELS BY SINCLAIR LEWIS
- OUR MR. WRENN
- THE TRAIL OF THE HAWK
- THE JOB
- FREE AIR
- MAIN STREET
- BABBITT
- ARROWSMITH
ARROWSMITH
By
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Author of Main Street, Babbitt, etc.
TORONTO
GEORGE J. McLEOD, LIMITED
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
Copyright, 1924, 1925, by
The Designer Publishing Company, Inc.
The first edition of Arrowsmith consists of 500 copies on handmade paper, numbered and signed by the author.
Second printing [first trade edition], January, 1925
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY
RAHWAY, N. J.
To Dr. Paul H. DeKruif I am indebted not only for most of the bacteriological and medical material in this tale but equally for his help in the planning of the fable itself—for his realization of the characters as living people, for his philosophy as a scientist. With this acknowledgment I want to record our months of companionship while working on the book, in the United States, in the West Indies, in Panama, in London and Fontainebleau. I wish I could reproduce our talks along the way, and the laboratory afternoons, the restaurants at night, and the deck at dawn as we steamed into tropic ports.
ARROWSMITH
CHAPTER I
I
The driver of the wagon swaying through forest and swamp of the Ohio wilderness was a ragged girl of fourteen. Her mother they had buried near the Monongahela—the girl herself had heaped with torn sods the grave beside the river of the beautiful name. Her father lay shrinking with fever on the floor of the wagon-box, and about him played her brothers and sisters, dirty brats, tattered brats, hilarious brats.
She halted at the fork in the grassy road, and the sick man quavered, “Emmy, ye better turn down towards Cincinnati. If we could find your Uncle Ed, I guess he’d take us in.”
“Nobody ain’t going to take us in,” she said. “We’re going on jus’ long as we can. Going West! They’s a whole lot of new things I aim to be seeing!”
She cooked the supper, she put the children to bed, and sat by the fire, alone.
That was the great-grandmother of Martin Arrowsmith.
II
Cross-legged in the examining-chair in Doc Vickerson’s office, a boy was reading “Gray’s Anatomy.” His name was Martin Arrowsmith, of Elk Mills, in the state of Winnemac.
There was a suspicion in Elk Mills—now, in 1897, a dowdy red-brick village, smelling of apples—that this brown-leather adjustable seat which Doc Vickerson used for minor operations, for the infrequent pulling of teeth and for highly frequent naps, had begun life as a barber’s chair. There was also a belief that its proprietor must once have been called Doctor Vickerson, but for years he had been only The Doc, and he was scurfier and much less adjustable than the chair.
Martin was the son of J. J. Arrowsmith, who conducted the New York Clothing Bazaar. By sheer brass and obstinacy he had, at fourteen, become the unofficial, also decidedly unpaid, assistant to the Doc, and while the Doc was on a country call he took charge—though what there was to take charge of, no one could ever make out. He was a slender boy, not very tall; his hair and restless eyes were black, his skin unusually white, and the contrast gave him an air of passionate variability. The squareness of his head and a reasonable breadth of shoulders saved him from any appearance of effeminacy or of that querulous timidity which artistic young gentlemen call Sensitiveness. When he lifted his head to listen, his right eyebrow, slightly higher than the left, rose and quivered in his characteristic expression of energy, of independence, and a hint that he could fight, a look of impertinent inquiry which had been known to annoy his teachers and the Sunday School superintendent.
Martin was, like most inhabitants of Elk Mills before the Slavo-Italian immigration, a Typical Pure-bred Anglo-Saxon American, which means that he was a union of German, French, Scotch, Irish, perhaps a little Spanish, conceivably a little of the strains lumped together as “Jewish,” and a great deal of English, which is itself a combination of Primitive Britain, Celt, Phœnician, Roman, German, Dane, and Swede.
It is not certain that, in attaching himself to Doc Vickerson, Martin was entirely and edifyingly controlled by a desire to become a Great Healer. He did awe his Gang by bandaging stone-bruises, dissecting squirrels, and explaining the astounding and secret matters to be discovered at the back of the physiology, but he was not completely free from an ambition to command such glory among them as was enjoyed by the son of the Episcopalian minister, who could smoke an entire cigar without becoming sick. Yet this afternoon he read steadily at the section on the lymphatic system, and he muttered the long and perfectly incomprehensible words in a hum which made drowsier the dusty room.
It was the central room of the three occupied by Doc Vickerson, facing on Main Street above the New York Clothing Bazaar. On one side of it was the foul waiting-room, on the other, the Doc’s bedroom. He was an aged widower; for what he called “female fixings” he cared nothing; and the bedroom with its tottering bureau and its cot of frowsy blankets was cleaned only by Martin, in not very frequent attacks of sanitation.
This central room was at once business office, consultation-room, operating-theater, living-room, poker den, and warehouse for guns and fishing-tackle. Against a brown plaster wall was a cabinet of zoölogical collections and medical curiosities, and beside it the most dreadful and fascinating object known to the boy-world of Elk Mills—a skeleton with one gaunt gold tooth. On evenings when the Doc was away, Martin would acquire prestige among the trembling Gang by leading them into the unutterable darkness and scratching a sulfur match on the skeleton’s jaw.
On the wall was a home-stuffed pickerel on a home-varnished board. Beside the rusty stove, a sawdust-box cuspidor rested on a slimy oilcloth worn through to the threads. On the senile table was a pile of memoranda of debts which the Doc was always swearing he would “collect from those dead-beats right now,” and which he would never, by any chance, at any time, collect from any of them. A year or two—a decade or two—a century or two—they were all the same to the plodding doctor in the bee-murmuring town.
The most unsanitary corner was devoted to the cast-iron sink, which was oftener used for washing eggy breakfast plates than for sterilizing instruments. On its ledge were a broken test-tube, a broken fish-hook, an unlabeled and forgotten bottle of pills, a nail-bristling heel, a frayed cigar-butt, and a rusty lancet stuck in a potato.
The wild raggedness of the room was the soul and symbol of Doc Vickerson; it was more exciting than the flat-faced stack of shoe-boxes in the New York Bazaar: it was the lure to questioning and adventure for Martin Arrowsmith.
III
The boy raised his head, cocked his inquisitive brow. On the stairway was the cumbersome step of Doc Vickerson. The Doc was sober! Martin would not have to help him into bed.
But it was a bad sign that the Doc should first go down the hall to his bedroom. The boy listened sharply. He heard the Doc open the lower part of the washstand, where he kept his bottle of Jamaica rum. After a long gurgle the invisible Doc put away the bottle and decisively kicked the doors shut. Still good. Only one drink. If he came into the consultation-room at once, he would be safe. But he was still standing in the bedroom. Martin sighed as the washstand doors were hastily opened again, as he heard another gurgle and a third.
The Doc’s step was much livelier when he loomed into the office, a gray mass of a man with a gray mass of mustache, a form vast and unreal and undefined, like a cloud taking for the moment a likeness of humanity. With the brisk attack of one who wishes to escape the discussion of his guilt, the Doc rumbled while he waddled toward his desk-chair:
“What you doing here, young fella? What you doing here? I knew the cat would drag in something if I left the door unlocked.” He gulped slightly; he smiled to show that he was being humorous—people had been known to misconstrue the Doc’s humor.
He spoke more seriously, occasionally forgetting what he was talking about:
“Reading old Gray? That’s right. Physician’s library just three books: ‘Gray’s Anatomy’ and Bible and Shakespeare. Study. You may become great doctor. Locate in Zenith and make five thousand dollars year—much as United States Senator! Set a high goal. Don’t let things slide. Get training. Go college before go medical school. Study. Chemistry. Latin. Knowledge! I’m plug doc—got chick nor child—nobody—old drunk. But you—leadin’ physician. Make five thousand dollars year.
“Murray woman’s got endocarditis. Not thing I can do for her. Wants somebody hold her hand. Road’s damn’ disgrace. Culvert’s out, beyond the grove. ’Sgrace.
“Endocarditis and—
“Training, that’s what you got t’ get. Fundamentals. Know chemistry. Biology. I nev’ did. Mrs. Reverend Jones thinks she’s got gastric ulcer. Wants to go city for operation. Ulcer, hell! She and the Reverend both eat too much.
“Why they don’t repair that culvert— And don’t be a booze-hoister like me, either. And get your basic science. I’ll splain.”
The boy, normal village youngster though he was, given to stoning cats and to playing pom-pom-pullaway, gained something of the intoxication of treasure-hunting as the Doc struggled to convey his vision of the pride of learning, the universality of biology, the triumphant exactness of chemistry. A fat old man and dirty and unvirtuous was the Doc; his grammar was doubtful, his vocabulary alarming, and his references to his rival, good Dr. Needham, were scandalous; yet he invoked in Martin a vision of making chemicals explode with much noise and stink and of seeing animalcules that no boy in Elk Mills had ever beheld.
The Doc’s voice was thickening; he was sunk in his chair, blurry of eye and lax of mouth. Martin begged him to go to bed, but the Doc insisted:
“Don’t need nap. No. Now you lissen. You don’t appreciate but— Old man now. Giving you all I’ve learned. Show you collection. Only museum in whole county. Scientif’ pioneer.”
A hundred times had Martin obediently looked at the specimens in the brown, crackly-varnished bookcase: the beetles and chunks of mica; the embryo of a two-headed calf, the gall-stones removed from a respectable lady whom the Doc enthusiastically named to all visitors. The Doc stood before the case, waving an enormous but shaky forefinger.
“Looka that butterfly. Name is porthesia chrysorrhœa. Doc Needham couldn’t tell you that! He don’t know what butterflies are called! He don’t care if you get trained. Remember that name now?” He turned on Martin. “You payin’ attention? You interested? Huh? Oh, the devil! Nobody wants to know about my museum—not a person. Only one in county but— I’m an old failure.”
Martin asserted, “Honest, it’s slick!”
“Look here! Look here! See that? In the bottle? It’s an appendix. First one ever took out ’round here. I did it! Old Doc Vickerson, he did the first ’pendectomy in this neck of the woods, you bet! And first museum. It ain’t—so big—but it’s start. I haven’t put away money like Doc Needham, but I started first c’lection— I started it!”
He collapsed in a chair, groaning, “You’re right. Got to sleep. All in.” But as Martin helped him to his feet he broke away, scrabbled about on his desk, and looked back doubtfully. “Want to give you something—start your training. And remember the old man. Will anybody remember the old man?”
He was holding out the beloved magnifying glass which for years he had used in botanizing. He watched Martin slip the lens into his pocket, he sighed, he struggled for something else to say, and silently he lumbered into his bedroom.
CHAPTER II
I
The state of Winnemac is bounded by Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, and like them it is half Eastern, half Midwestern. There is a feeling of New England in its brick and sycamore villages, its stable industries, and a tradition which goes back to the Revolutionary War. Zenith, the largest city in the state, was founded in 1792. But Winnemac is Midwestern in its fields of corn and wheat, its red barns and silos, and, despite the immense antiquity of Zenith, many counties were not settled till 1860.
The University of Winnemac is at Mohalis, fifteen miles from Zenith. There are twelve thousand students; beside this prodigy Oxford is a tiny theological school and Harvard a select college for young gentlemen. The University has a baseball field under glass; its buildings are measured by the mile; it hires hundreds of young Doctors of Philosophy to give rapid instruction in Sanskrit, navigation, accountancy, spectacle-fitting, sanitary engineering, Provençal poetry, tariff schedules, rutabaga-growing, motor-car designing, the history of Voronezh, the style of Matthew Arnold, the diagnosis of myohypertrophia kymoparalytica, and department-store advertising. Its president is the best money-raiser and the best after-dinner speaker in the United States; and Winnemac was the first school in the world to conduct its extension courses by radio.
It is not a snobbish rich-man’s college, devoted to leisurely nonsense. It is the property of the people of the state, and what they want—or what they are told they want—is a mill to turn out men and women who will lead moral lives, play bridge, drive good cars, be enterprising in business, and occasionally mention books, though they are not expected to have time to read them. It is a Ford Motor Factory, and if its products rattle a little, they are beautifully standardized, with perfectly interchangeable parts. Hourly the University of Winnemac grows in numbers and influence, and by 1950 one may expect it to have created an entirely new world-civilization, a civilization larger and brisker and purer.
II
In 1904, when Martin Arrowsmith was an Arts and Science Junior preparing for medical school, Winnemac had but five thousand students yet it was already brisk.
Martin was twenty-one. He still seemed pale, in contrast to his black smooth hair, but he was a respectable runner, a fair basket-ball center, and a savage hockey-player. The co-eds murmured that he “looked so romantic,” but as this was before the invention of sex and the era of petting-parties, they merely talked about him at a distance, and he did not know that he could have been a hero of amours. For all his stubbornness he was shy. He was not entirely ignorant of caresses but he did not make an occupation of them. He consorted with men whose virile pride it was to smoke filthy corncob pipes and to wear filthy sweaters.
The University had become his world. For him Elk Mills did not exist. Doc Vickerson was dead and buried and forgotten; Martin’s father and mother were dead, leaving him only enough money for his arts and medical courses. The purpose of life was chemistry and physics and the prospect of biology next year.
His idol was Professor Edward Edwards, head of the department of chemistry, who was universally known as “Encore.” Edwards’ knowledge of the history of chemistry was immense. He could read Arabic, and he infuriated his fellow chemists by asserting that the Arabs had anticipated all their researches. Himself, Professor Edwards never did researches. He sat before fires and stroked his collie and chuckled in his beard.
This evening Encore was giving one of his small and popular At Home’s. He lolled in a brown-corduroy Morris chair, being quietly humorous for the benefit of Martin and half a dozen other fanatical young chemists, and baiting Dr. Norman Brumfit, the instructor in English. The room was full of heartiness and beer and Brumfit.
Every university faculty must have a Wild Man to provide thrills and to shock crowded lecture-rooms. Even in so energetically virtuous an institution as Winnemac there was one Wild Man, and he was Norman Brumfit. He was permitted, without restriction, to speak of himself as immoral, agnostic, and socialistic, so long as it was universally known that he remained pure, Presbyterian, and Republican. Dr. Brumfit was in form, to-night. He asserted that whenever a man showed genius, it could be proved that he had Jewish blood. Like all discussions of Judaism at Winnemac, this led to the mention of Max Gottlieb, professor of bacteriology in the medical school.
Professor Gottlieb was the mystery of the university. It was known that he was a Jew, born and educated in Germany, and that his work on immunology had given him fame in the East and in Europe. He rarely left his small brown weedy house except to return to his laboratory, and few students outside of his classes had ever identified him, but every one had heard of his tall, lean, dark aloofness. A thousand fables fluttered about him. It was believed that he was the son of a German prince, that he had immense wealth, that he lived as sparsely as the other professors only because he was doing terrifying and costly experiments which probably had something to do with human sacrifice. It was said that he could create life in the laboratory, that he could talk to the monkeys which he inoculated, that he had been driven out of Germany as a devil-worshiper or an anarchist, and that he secretly drank real champagne every evening at dinner.
It was the tradition that faculty-members did not discuss their colleagues with students, but Max Gottlieb could not be regarded as anybody’s colleague. He was impersonal as the chill northeast wind. Dr. Brumfit rattled:
“I’m sufficiently liberal, I should assume, toward the claims of science, but with a man like Gottlieb— I’m prepared to believe that he knows all about material forces, but what astounds me is that such a man can be blind to the vital force that creates all others. He says that knowledge is worthless unless it is proven by rows of figures. Well, when one of you scientific sharks can take the genius of a Ben Jonson and measure it with a yardstick, then I’ll admit that we literary chaps, with our doubtless absurd belief in beauty and loyalty and the world o’ dreams, are off on the wrong track!”
Martin Arrowsmith was not exactly certain what this meant and he enthusiastically did not care. He was relieved when Professor Edwards from the midst of his beardedness and smokiness made a sound curiously like “Oh, hell!” and took the conversation away from Brumfit. Ordinarily Encore would have suggested, with amiable malice, that Gottlieb was a “crapehanger” who wasted time destroying the theories of other men instead of making new ones of his own. But to-night, in detestation of such literary playboys as Brumfit, he exalted Gottlieb’s long, lonely, failure-burdened effort to synthesize antitoxin, and his diabolic pleasure in disproving his own contentions as he would those of Ehrlich or Sir Almroth Wright. He spoke of Gottlieb’s great book, “Immunology,” which had been read by seven-ninths of all the men in the world who could possibly understand it—the number of these being nine.
The party ended with Mrs. Edwards’ celebrated doughnuts. Martin tramped toward his boarding-house through a veiled spring night. The discussion of Gottlieb had roused him to a reasonless excitement. He thought of working in a laboratory at night, alone, absorbed, contemptuous of academic success and of popular classes. Himself, he believed, he had never seen the man, but he knew that Gottlieb’s laboratory was in the Main Medical Building. He drifted toward the distant medical campus. The few people whom he met were hurrying with midnight timidity. He entered the shadow of the Anatomy Building, grim as a barracks, still as the dead men lying up there in the dissecting-room. Beyond him was the turreted bulk of the Main Medical Building, a harsh and blurry mass, high up in its dark wall a single light. He started. The light had gone out abruptly, as though an agitated watcher were trying to hide from him.
On the stone steps of the Main Medical, two minutes after, appeared beneath the arc-light a tall figure, ascetic, self-contained, apart. His swart cheeks were gaunt, his nose high-bridged and thin. He did not hurry, like the belated home-bodies. He was unconscious of the world. He looked at Martin and through him; he moved away, muttering to himself, his shoulders stooped, his long hands clasped behind him. He was lost in the shadows, himself a shadow.
He had worn the threadbare top-coat of a poor professor yet Martin remembered him as wrapped in a black velvet cape with a silver star arrogant on his breast.
III
On his first day in medical school, Martin Arrowsmith was in a high state of superiority. As a medic he was more picturesque than other students, for medics are reputed to know secrets, horrors, exhilarating wickednesses. Men from the other departments go to their rooms to peer into their books. But also as an academic graduate, with a training in the basic sciences, he felt superior to his fellow medics, most of whom had but a high-school diploma, with perhaps one year in a ten-room Lutheran college among the cornfields.
For all his pride, Martin was nervous. He thought of operating, of making a murderous wrong incision; and with a more immediate, macabre fear, he thought of the dissecting-room and the stony, steely Anatomy Building. He had heard older medics mutter of its horrors: of corpses hanging by hooks, like rows of ghastly fruit, in an abominable tank of brine in the dark basement; of Henry the janitor, who was said to haul the cadavers out of the brine, to inject red lead into their veins, and to scold them as he stuffed them on the dumb-waiter.
There was prairie freshness in the autumn day but Martin did not heed. He hurried into the slate-colored hall of the Main Medical, up the wide stairs to the office of Max Gottlieb. He did not look at passing students, and when he bumped into them he grunted in confused apology. It was a portentous hour. He was going to specialize in bacteriology; he was going to discover enchanting new germs; Professor Gottlieb was going to recognize him as a genius, make him an assistant, predict for him— He halted in Gottlieb’s private laboratory, a small, tidy apartment with racks of cotton-corked test-tubes on the bench, a place unimpressive and unmagical save for the constant-temperature bath with its tricky thermometer and electric bulbs. He waited till another student, a stuttering gawk of a student, had finished talking to Gottlieb, dark, lean, impassive at his desk in a cubbyhole of an office, then he plunged.
If in the misty April night Gottlieb had been romantic as a cloaked horseman, he was now testy and middle-aged. Near at hand, Martin could see wrinkles beside the hawk eyes. Gottlieb had turned back to his desk, which was heaped with shabby note-books, sheets of calculations, and a marvelously precise chart with red and green curves descending to vanish at zero. The calculations were delicate, minute, exquisitely clear; and delicate were the scientist’s thin hands among the papers. He looked up, spoke with a hint of German accent. His words were not so much mispronounced as colored with a warm unfamiliar tint.
“Vell? Yes?”
“Oh, Professor Gottlieb, my name is Arrowsmith. I’m a medic freshman, Winnemac B. A. I’d like awfully to take bacteriology this fall instead of next year. I’ve had a lot of chemistry—”
“No. It is not time for you.”
“Honest, I know I could do it now.”
“There are two kinds of students that the gods give me. One kind they dump on me like a bushel of potatoes. I do not like potatoes, and the potatoes they do not ever seem to have great affection for me, but I take them and teach them to kill patients. The other kind—they are very few!—they seem for some reason that is not at all clear to me to wish a liddle bit to become scientists, to work with bugs and make mistakes. Those, ah, those, I seize them, I denounce them, I teach them right away the ultimate lesson of science, which is to wait and doubt. Of the potatoes, I demand nothing; of the foolish ones like you, who think I could teach them something, I demand everything. No. You are too young. Come back next year.”
“But honestly, with my chemistry—”
“Have you taken physical chemistry?”
“No, sir, but I did pretty well in organic.”
“Organic chemistry! Puzzle chemistry! Stink chemistry! Drug-store chemistry! Physical chemistry is power, it is exactness, it is life. But organic chemistry—that is a trade for pot-washers. No. You are too young. Come back in a year.”
Gottlieb was absolute. His talon fingers waved Martin to the door, and the boy hastened out, not daring to argue. He slunk off in misery. On the campus he met that jovial historian of chemistry, Encore Edwards, and begged, “Say, Professor, tell me, is there any value for a doctor in organic chemistry?”
“Value? Why, it seeks the drugs that allay pain! It produces the paint that slicks up your house, it dyes your sweetheart’s dress—and maybe, in these degenerate days, her cherry lips! Who the dickens has been talking scandal about my organic chemistry?”
“Nobody. I was just wondering,” Martin complained, and he drifted to the College Inn where, in an injured and melancholy manner, he devoured an enormous banana-split and a bar of almond chocolate, as he meditated:
“I want to take bacteriology. I want to get down to the bottom of this disease stuff. I’ll learn some physical chemistry. I’ll show old Gottlieb, damn him! Some day I’ll discover the germ of cancer or something, and then he’ll look foolish in the face!... Oh, Lord, I hope I won’t take sick, first time I go into the dissecting-room.... I want to take bacteriology—now!”
He recalled Gottlieb’s sardonic face; he felt and feared his quality of dynamic hatred. Then he remembered the wrinkles, and he saw Max Gottlieb not as a genius but as a man who had headaches, who became agonizingly tired, who could be loved.
“I wonder if Encore Edwards knows as much as I thought he did? What is Truth?” he puzzled.
IV
Martin was jumpy on his first day of dissecting. He could not look at the inhumanly stiff faces of the starveling gray men lying on the wooden tables. But they were so impersonal, these lost old men, that in two days he was, like the other medics, calling them “Billy” and “Ike” and “the Parson,” and regarding them as he had regarded animals in biology. The dissecting-room itself was impersonal: hard cement floor, walls of hard plaster between wire-glass windows. Martin detested the reek of formaldehyde; that and some dreadful subtle other odor seemed to cling about him outside the dissecting-room; but he smoked cigarettes to forget it, and in a week he was exploring arteries with youthful and altogether unholy joy.
His dissecting partner was the Reverend Ira Hinkley, known to the class by a similar but different name.
Ira was going to be a medical missionary. He was a man of twenty-nine, a graduate of Pottsburg Christian College and of the Sanctification Bible and Missions School. He had played football; he was as strong and nearly as large as a steer, and no steer ever bellowed more enormously. He was a bright and happy Christian, a romping optimist who laughed away sin and doubt, a joyful Puritan who with annoying virility preached the doctrine of his tiny sect, the Sanctification Brotherhood, that to have a beautiful church was almost as damnable as the debaucheries of card-playing.
Martin found himself viewing “Billy,” their cadaver—an undersized, blotchy old man with a horrible little red beard on his petrified, vealy face—as a machine, fascinating, complex, beautiful, but a machine. It damaged his already feeble belief in man’s divinity and immortality. He might have kept his doubts to himself, revolving them slowly as he dissected out the nerves of the mangled upper arm, but Ira Hinkley would not let him alone. Ira believed that he could bring even medical students to bliss, which, to Ira, meant singing extraordinarily long and unlovely hymns in a chapel of the Sanctification Brotherhood.
“Mart, my son,” he roared, “do you realize that in this, what some might call a sordid task, we are learning things that will enable us to heal the bodies and comfort the souls of countless lost unhappy folks?”
“Huh! Souls. I haven’t found one yet in old Billy. Honest, do you believe that junk?”
Ira clenched his fist and scowled, then belched with laughter, slapped Martin distressingly on the back, and clamored, “Brother, you’ve got to do better than that to get Ira’s goat! You think you’ve got a lot of these fancy Modern Doubts. You haven’t—you’ve only got indigestion. What you need is exercise and faith. Come on over to the Y. M. C. A. and I’ll take you for a swim and pray with you. Why, you poor skinny little agnostic, here you have a chance to see the Almighty’s handiwork, and all you grab out of it is a feeling that you’re real smart. Buck up, young Arrowsmith. You don’t know how funny you are, to a fellow that’s got a serene faith!”
To the delight of Clif Clawson, the class jester, who worked at the next table, Ira chucked Martin in the ribs, patted him, very painfully, upon the head, and amiably resumed work, while Martin danced with irritation.
V
In college Martin had been a “barb”—he had not belonged to a Greek Letter secret society. He had been “rushed,” but he had resented the condescension of the aristocracy of men from the larger cities. Now that most of his Arts classmates had departed to insurance offices, law schools, and banks, he was lonely, and tempted by an invitation from Digamma Pi, the chief medical fraternity.
Digamma Pi was a lively boarding-house with a billiard table and low prices. Rough and amiable noises came from it at night, and a good deal of singing about When I Die Don’t Bury Me at All; yet for three years Digams had won the valedictory and the Hugh Loizeau Medal in Experimental Surgery. This autumn the Digams elected Ira Hinkley, because they had been gaining a reputation for dissipation—girls were said to have been smuggled in late at night—and no company which included the Reverend Mr. Hinkley could possibly be taken by the Dean as immoral, which was an advantage if they were to continue comfortably immoral.
Martin had prized the independence of his solitary room. In a fraternity, all tennis rackets, trousers, and opinions are held in common. When Ira found that Martin was hesitating, he insisted, “Oh, come on in! Digam needs you. You do study hard— I’ll say that for you—and think what a chance you’ll have to influence The Fellows for good.”
(On all occasions, Ira referred to his classmates as The Fellows, and frequently he used the term in prayers at the Y. M. C. A.)
“I don’t want to influence anybody. I want to learn the doctor trade and make six thousand dollars a year.”
“My boy, if you only knew how foolish you sound when you try to be cynical! When you’re as old as I am, you’ll understand that the glory of being a doctor is that you can teach folks high ideals while you soothe their tortured bodies.”
“Suppose they don’t want my particular brand of high ideals?”
“Mart, have I got to stop and pray with you?”
“No! Quit! Honestly, Hinkley, of all the Christians I ever met you take the rottenest advantages. You can lick anybody in the class, and when I think of how you’re going to bully the poor heathen when you get to be a missionary, and make the kids put on breeches, and marry off all the happy lovers to the wrong people, I could bawl!”
The prospect of leaving his sheltered den for the patronage of the Reverend Mr. Hinkley was intolerable. It was not till Angus Duer accepted election to Digamma Pi that Martin himself came in.
Duer was one of the few among Martin’s classmates in the academic course who had gone on with him to the Winnemac medical school. Duer had been the valedictorian. He was a silent, sharp-faced, curly-headed, rather handsome young man, and he never squandered an hour or a good impulse. So brilliant was his work in biology and chemistry that a Chicago surgeon had promised him a place in his clinic. Martin compared Angus Duer to a razor blade on a January morning; he hated him, was uncomfortable with him, and envied him. He knew that in biology Duer had been too busy passing examinations to ponder, to get any concept of biology as a whole. He knew that Duer was a tricky chemist, who neatly and swiftly completed the experiments demanded by the course and never ventured on original experiments which, leading him into a confused land of wondering, might bring him to glory or disaster. He was sure that Duer cultivated his manner of chill efficiency to impress instructors. Yet the man stood out so bleakly from a mass of students who could neither complete their experiments nor ponder nor do anything save smoke pipes and watch football-practice that Martin loved him while he hated him, and almost meekly he followed him into Digamma Pi.
Martin, Ira Hinkley, Angus Duer, Clif Clawson, the meaty class jester, and one “Fatty” Pfaff were initiated into Digamma Pi together. It was a noisy and rather painful performance, which included smelling asafetida. Martin was bored, but Fatty Pfaff was in squeaking, billowing, gasping terror.
Fatty was of all the new Freshmen candidates the most useful to Digamma Pi. He was planned by nature to be a butt. He looked like a distended hot-water bottle; he was magnificently imbecile; he believed everything, he knew nothing, he could memorize nothing; and anxiously he forgave the men who got through the vacant hours by playing jokes upon him. They persuaded him that mustard plasters were excellent for colds—solicitously they gathered about him, affixed an enormous plaster to his back, and afterward fondly removed it. They concealed the ear of a cadaver in his nice, clean, new pocket handkerchief when he went to Sunday supper at the house of a girl cousin in Zenith.... At supper he produced the handkerchief with a flourish.
Every night when Fatty retired he had to remove from his bed a collection of objects which thoughtful house-mates had stuffed between the sheets—soap, alarm clocks, fish. He was the perfect person to whom to sell useless things. Clif Clawson, who combined a brisk huckstering with his jokes, sold to Fatty for four dollars a History of Medicine which he had bought, second-hand, for two, and while Fatty never read it, never conceivably could read it, the possession of the fat red book made him feel learned. But Fatty’s greatest beneficence to Digamma was his belief in spiritualism. He went about in terror of spooks. He was always seeing them emerging at night from the dissecting-room windows. His classmates took care that he should behold a great many of them flitting about the halls of the fraternity.
VI
Digamma Pi was housed in a residence built in the expansive days of 1885. The living-room suggested a recent cyclone. Knife-gashed tables, broken Morris chairs, and torn rugs were flung about the room, and covered with backless books, hockey shoes, caps, and cigarette stubs. Above, there were four men to a bedroom, and the beds were iron double-deckers, like a steerage.
For ash-trays the Digams used sawed skulls, and on the bedroom walls were anatomical charts, to be studied while dressing. In Martin’s room was a complete skeleton. He and his roommates had trustingly bought it from a salesman who came out from a Zenith surgical supply house. He was such a genial and sympathetic salesman; he gave them cigars and told G. U. stories and explained what prosperous doctors they were all going to be. They bought the skeleton gratefully, on the instalment plan.... Later the salesman was less genial.
Martin roomed with Clif Clawson, Fatty Pfaff, and an earnest second-year medic named Irving Watters.
Any psychologist desiring a perfectly normal man for use in demonstrations could not have done better than to have engaged Irving Watters. He was always and carefully dull; smilingly, easily, dependably dull. If there was any cliché which he did not use, it was because he had not yet heard it. He believed in morality—except on Saturday evenings; he believed in the Episcopal Church—but not the High Church; he believed in the Constitution, Darwinism, systematic exercise in the gymnasium, and the genius of the president of the university.
Among them, Martin most liked Clif Clawson. Clif was the clown of the fraternity-house, he was given to raucous laughter, he clogged and sang meaningless songs, he even practised on the cornet, yet he was somehow a good fellow and solid, and Martin, in his detestation of Ira Hinkley, his fear of Angus Duer, his pity for Fatty Pfaff, his distaste for the amiable dullness of Irving Watters, turned to the roaring Clif as to something living and experimenting. At least Clif had reality; the reality of a plowed field, of a steaming manure-pile. It was Clif who would box with him; Clif who—though he loved to sit for hours smoking, grunting, magnificently loafing—could be persuaded to go for a five-mile walk.
And it was Clif who risked death by throwing baked beans at the Reverend Ira Hinkley at supper, when Ira was bulkily and sweetly corrective.
In the dissecting-room Ira was maddening enough with his merriment at such of Martin’s ideas as had not been accepted in Pottsburg Christian College, but in the fraternity-house he was a moral pest. He never ceased trying to stop their profanity. After three years on a backwoods football team he still believed with unflinching optimism that he could sterilize young men by administering reproofs, with the nickering of a lady Sunday School teacher and the delicacy of a charging elephant.
Ira also had statistics about Clean Living.
He was full of statistics. Where he got them did not matter to him; figures in the daily papers, in the census report, or in the Miscellany Column of the Sanctification Herald were equally valid. He announced at supper table, “Clif, it’s a wonder to me how as bright a fella as you can go on sucking that dirty old pipe. D’you realize that 67.9 per cent. of all women who go to the operating table have husbands who smoke tobacco?”
“What the devil would they smoke?” demanded Clif.
“Where’d you get those figures?” from Martin.
“They came out at a medical convention in Philadelphia in 1902,” Ira condescended. “Of course I don’t suppose it’ll make any difference to a bunch of wise galoots like you that some day you’ll marry a nice bright little woman and ruin her life with your vices. Sure, keep right on—fine brave virile bunch! A poor weakling preacher like me wouldn’t dare do anything so brave as smoke a pipe!”
He left them triumphantly, and Martin groaned, “Ira makes me want to get out of medicine and be an honest harness-maker.”
“Aw, gee now, Mart,” Fatty Pfaff complained, “you oughtn’t to cuss Ira out. He’s awful sincere.”
“Sincere? Hell! So is a cockroach!”
Thus they jabbered, while Angus Duer watched them in a superior silence that made Martin nervous. In the study of the profession to which he had looked forward all his life he found irritation and vacuity as well as serene wisdom; he saw no one clear path to Truth but a thousand paths to a thousand truths far-off and doubtful.
CHAPTER III
I
John A. Robertshaw, John Aldington Robertshaw, professor of physiology in the medical school, was rather deaf, and he was the only teacher in the University of Winnemac who still wore mutton-chop whiskers. He came from Back Bay; he was proud of it and let you know about it. With three other Brahmins he formed in Mohalis a Boston colony which stood for sturdy sweetness and decorously shaded light. On all occasions he remarked, “When I was studying with Ludwig in Germany—” He was too absorbed in his own correctness to heed individual students, and Clif Clawson and the other young men technically known as “hell-raisers” looked forward to his lectures on physiology.
They were held in an amphitheater whose seats curved so far around that the lecturer could not see both ends at once, and while Dr. Robertshaw, continuing to drone about blood circulation, was peering to the right to find out who was making that outrageous sound like a motor horn, far over on the left Clif Clawson would rise and imitate him, with sawing arm and stroking of imaginary whiskers. Once Clif produced the masterpiece of throwing a brick into the sink beside the platform, just when Dr. Robertshaw was working up to his annual climax about the effect of brass bands on the intensity of the knee-jerk.
Martin had been reading Max Gottlieb’s scientific papers—as much of them as he could read, with their morass of mathematical symbols—and from them he had a conviction that experiments should be something dealing with the foundations of life and death, with the nature of bacterial infection, with the chemistry of bodily reactions. When Robertshaw chirped about fussy little experiments, standard experiments, maiden-aunt experiments, Martin was restless. In college he had felt that prosody and Latin Composition were futile, and he had looked forward to the study of medicine as illumination. Now, in melancholy worry about his own unreasonableness, he found that he was developing the same contempt for Robertshaw’s rules of the thumb—and for most of the work in anatomy.
The professor of anatomy, Dr. Oliver O. Stout, was himself an anatomy, a dissection-chart, a thinly covered knot of nerves and blood vessels and bones. Stout had precise and enormous knowledge; in his dry voice he could repeat more facts about the left little toe than you would have thought anybody would care to learn regarding the left little toe.
No discussion at the Digamma Pi supper table was more violent than the incessant debate over the value to a doctor, a decent normal doctor who made a good living and did not worry about reading papers at medical associations, of remembering anatomical terms. But no matter what they thought, they all ground at learning the lists of names which enable a man to crawl through examinations and become an Educated Person, with a market value of five dollars an hour. Unknown sages had invented rimes which enabled them to memorize. At supper—the thirty piratical Digams sitting at a long and spotty table, devouring clam chowder and beans and codfish balls and banana layer-cake—the Freshmen earnestly repeated after a senior:
On old Olympus’ topmost top
A fat-eared German viewed a hop.
Thus by association with the initial letters they mastered the twelve cranial nerves: olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, and the rest. To the Digams it was the world’s noblest poem, and they remembered it for years after they had become practising physicians and altogether forgotten the names of the nerves themselves.
II
In Dr. Stout’s anatomy lectures there were no disturbances, but in his dissecting-room were many pleasantries. The mildest of them was the insertion of a fire-cracker in the cadaver on which the two virginal and unhappy co-eds worked. The real excitement during Freshman year was the incident of Clif Clawson and the pancreas.
Clif had been elected class president, for the year, because he was so full of greetings. He never met a classmate in the hall of Main Medical without shouting, “How’s your vermiform appendix functioning this morning?” or “I bid thee a lofty greeting, old pediculosis.” With booming decorum he presided at class meetings (indignant meetings to denounce the proposal to let the “aggies” use the North Side Tennis Courts), but in private life he was less decorous.
The terrible thing happened when the Board of Regents were being shown through the campus. The Regents were the supreme rulers of the University; they were bankers and manufacturers and pastors of large churches; to them even the president was humble. Nothing gave them more interesting thrills than the dissecting-room of the medical school. The preachers spoke morally of the effect of alcohol on paupers, and the bankers of the disrespect for savings-accounts which is always to be seen in the kind of men who insist on becoming cadavers. In the midst of the tour, led by Dr. Stout and the umbrella-carrying secretary of the University, the plumpest and most educational of all the bankers stopped near Clif Clawson’s dissecting-table, with his derby hat reverently held behind him, and into that hat Clif dropped a pancreas.
Now a pancreas is a damp and disgusting thing to find in your new hat, and when the banker did so find one, he threw down the hat and said that the students of Winnemac had gone to the devil. Dr. Stout and the secretary comforted him; they cleaned the derby and assured him that vengeance should be done on the man who could put a pancreas in a banker’s hat.
Dr. Stout summoned Clif, as president of the Freshmen. Clif was pained. He assembled the class, he lamented that any Winnemac Man could place a pancreas in a banker’s hat, and he demanded that the criminal be manly enough to stand up and confess.
Unfortunately the Reverend Ira Hinkley, who sat between Martin and Angus Duer, had seen Clif drop the pancreas. He growled, “This is outrageous! I’m going to expose Clawson, even if he is a frat-brother of mine.”
Martin protested, “Cut it out. You don’t want to get him fired?”
“He ought to be!”
Angus Duer turned in his seat, looked at Ira, and suggested, “Will you kindly shut up?” and, as Ira subsided, Angus became to Martin more admirable and more hateful than ever.
III
When he was depressed by a wonder as to why he was here, listening to a Professor Robertshaw, repeating verses about fat-eared Germans, learning the trade of medicine like Fatty Pfaff or Irving Watters, then Martin had relief in what he considered debauches. Actually they were extremely small debauches; they rarely went beyond too much lager in the adjacent city of Zenith, or the smiles of a factory girl parading the sordid back avenues, but to Martin, with his pride in taut strength, his joy in a clear brain, they afterward seemed tragic.
His safest companion was Clif Clawson. No matter how much bad beer he drank, Clif was never much more intoxicated than in his normal state. Martin sank or rose to Clif’s buoyancy, while Clif rose or sank to Martin’s speculativeness. As they sat in a back-room, at a table glistening with beer-glass rings, Clif shook his finger and babbled, “You’re only one ’at gets me, Mart. You know with all the hell-raising, and all the talk about bein’ c’mmercial that I pull on these high boys like Ira Stinkley, I’m jus’ sick o’ c’mmerialism an’ bunk as you are.”
“Sure. You bet,” Martin agreed with alcoholic fondness. “You’re jus’ like me. My God, do you get it—dough-face like Irving Watters or heartless climber like Angus Duer, and then old Gottlieb! Ideal of research! Never bein’ content with what seems true! Alone, not carin’ a damn, square-toed as a captain on the bridge, working all night, getting to the bottom of things!”
“Thash stuff. That’s my idee, too. Lez have ’nother beer. Shake you for it!” observed Clif Clawson.
Zenith, with its saloons, was fifteen miles from Mohalis and the University of Winnemac; half an hour by the huge, roaring, steel interurban trolleys, and to Zenith the medical students went for their forays. To say that one had “gone into town last night” was a matter for winks and leers. But with Angus Duer, Martin discovered a new Zenith.
At supper Duer said abruptly, “Come into town with me and hear a concert.”
For all his fancied superiority to the class, Martin was illimitably ignorant of literature, of painting, of music. That the bloodless and acquisitive Angus Duer should waste time listening to fiddlers was astounding to him. He discovered that Duer had enthusiasm for two composers, called Bach and Beethoven, presumably Germans, and that he himself did not yet comprehend all the ways of the world. On the interurban, Duer’s gravity loosened, and he cried, “Boy, if I hadn’t been born to carve up innards, I’d have been a great musician! To-night I’m going to lead you right into Heaven!”
Martin found himself in a confusion of little chairs and vast gilded arches, of polite but disapproving ladies with programs in their laps, unromantic musicians making unpleasant noises below and, at last, incomprehensible beauty, which made for him pictures of hills and deep forests, then suddenly became achingly long-winded. He exulted, “I’m going to have ’em all—the fame of Max Gottlieb— I mean his ability—and the lovely music and lovely women— Golly! I’m going to do big things. And see the world.... Will this piece never quit?”
IV
It was a week after the concert that he rediscovered Madeline Fox.
Madeline was a handsome, high-colored, high-spirited, opinionated girl whom Martin had known in college. She was staying on, ostensibly to take a graduate course in English, actually to avoid going back home. She considered herself a superb tennis player; she played it with energy and voluble swoopings and large lack of direction. She believed herself to be a connoisseur of literature; the fortunates to whom she gave her approval were Hardy, Meredith, Howells, and Thackeray, none of whom she had read for five years. She had often reproved Martin for his inappreciation of Howells, for wearing flannel shirts, and for his failure to hand her down from street-cars in the manner of a fiction hero. In college, they had gone to dances together, though as a dancer Martin was more spirited than accurate, and his partners sometimes had difficulty in deciding just what he was trying to dance. He liked Madeline’s tall comeliness and her vigor; he felt that with her energetic culture she was somehow “good for him.” During this year, he had scarcely seen her. He thought of her late in the evenings, and planned to telephone to her, and did not telephone. But as he became doubtful about medicine he longed for her sympathy, and on a Sunday afternoon of spring he took her for a walk along the Chaloosa River.
From the river bluffs the prairie stretches in exuberant rolling hills. In the long barley fields, the rough pastures, the stunted oaks and brilliant birches, there is the adventurousness of the frontier, and like young plainsmen they tramped the bluffs and told each other they were going to conquer the world.
He complained, “These damn’ medics—”
“Oh, Martin, do you think ‘damn’ is a nice word?” said Madeline.
He did think it was a very nice word indeed, and constantly useful to a busy worker, but her smile was desirable.
“Well—these darn’ studes, they aren’t trying to learn science; they’re simply learning a trade. They just want to get the knowledge that’ll enable them to cash in. They don’t talk about saving lives but about ‘losing cases’—losing dollars! And they wouldn’t even mind losing cases if it was a sensational operation that’d advertise ’em! They make me sick! How many of ’em do you find that’re interested in the work Ehrlich is doing in Germany—yes, or that Max Gottlieb is doing right here and now! Gottlieb’s just taken an awful fall out of Wright’s opsonin theory.”
“Has he, really?”
“Has he! I should say he had! And do you get any of the medics stirred up about it? You do not! They say, ‘Oh, sure, science is all right in its way; helps a doc to treat his patients,’ and then they begin to argue about whether they can make more money if they locate in a big city or a town, and is it better for a young doc to play the good-fellow and lodge game, or join the church and look earnest. You ought to hear Irve Watters. He’s just got one idea: the fellow that gets ahead in medicine, is he the lad that knows his pathology? Oh, no; the bird that succeeds is the one that gets an office on a northeast corner, near a trolley car junction, with a ’phone number that’ll be easy for patients to remember! Honest! He said so! I swear, when I graduate I believe I’ll be a ship’s doctor. You see the world that way, and at least you aren’t racing up and down the boat trying to drag patients away from some rival doc that has an office on another deck!”
“Yes, I know; it’s dreadful the way people don’t have ideals about their work. So many of the English grad students just want to make money teaching, instead of enjoying scholarship the way I do.”
It was disconcerting to Martin that she should seem to think that she was a superior person quite as much as himself, but he was even more disconcerted when she bubbled:
“At the same time, Martin, one does have to be practical, doesn’t one! Think how much more money—no, I mean how much more social position and power for doing good a successful doctor has than one of these scientists that just putter, and don’t know what’s going on in the world. Look at a surgeon like Dr. Loizeau, riding up to the hospital in a lovely car with a chauffeur in uniform, and all his patients simply worshiping him, and then your Max Gottlieb—somebody pointed him out to me the other day, and he had on a dreadful old suit, and I certainly thought he could stand a hair-cut.”
Martin turned on her with fury, statistics, vituperation, religious zeal, and confused metaphors. They sat on a crooked old-fashioned rail-fence where over the sun-soaked bright plantains the first insects of spring were humming. In the storm of his fanaticism she lost her airy Culture and squeaked, “Yes, I see now, I see,” without stating what it was she saw. “Oh, you do have a fine mind and such fine—such integrity.”
“Honest? Do you think I have?”
“Oh, indeed I do, and I’m sure you’re going to have a wonderful future. And I’m so glad you aren’t commercial, like the others. Don’t mind what they say!”
He noted that Madeline was not only a rare and understanding spirit but also an extraordinarily desirable woman—fresh color, tender eyes, adorable slope from shoulder to side. As they walked back, he perceived that she was incredibly the right mate for him. Under his training she would learn the distinction between vague “ideals” and the hard sureness of science. They paused on the bluff, looking down at the muddy Chaloosa, a springtime Western river wild with floating branches. He yearned for her; he regretted the casual affairs of a student and determined to be a pure and extremely industrious young man, to be, in fact, “worthy of her.”
“Oh, Madeline,” he mourned, “you’re so darn’ lovely!”
She glanced at him, timidly.
He caught her hand; in a desperate burst he tried to kiss her. It was very badly done. He managed only to kiss the point of her jaw, while she struggled and begged, “Oh, don’t!” They did not acknowledge, as they ambled back into Mohalis, that the incident had occurred, but there was softness in their voices and without impatience now she heard his denunciation of Professor Robertshaw as a phonograph, and he listened to her remarks on the shallowness and vulgarity of Dr. Norman Brumfit, that sprightly English instructor. At her boarding-house she sighed, “I wish I could ask you to come in, but it’s almost suppertime and— Will you call me up some day?”
“You bet I will!” said Martin, according to the rules for amorous discourse in the University of Winnemac.
He raced home in adoration. As he lay in his narrow upper bunk at midnight, he saw her eyes, now impertinent, now reproving, now warm with trust in him. “I love her! I love her! I’ll phone her— Wonder if I dare call her up as early as eight in the morning?”
But at eight he was too busy studying the lacrimal apparatus to think of ladies’ eyes. He saw Madeline only once, and in the publicity of her boarding-house porch, crowded with co-eds, red cushions, and marshmallows, before he was hurled into hectic studying for the year’s final examinations.
V
At examination-time, Digamma Pi fraternity showed its value to urgent seekers after wisdom. Generations of Digams had collected test-papers and preserved them in the sacred Quiz Book; geniuses for detail had labored through the volume and marked with red pencil the problems most often set in the course of years. The Freshmen crouched in a ring about Ira Hinkley in the Digam living-room, while he read out the questions they were most likely to get. They writhed, clawed their hair, scratched their chins, bit their fingers, and beat their temples in the endeavor to give the right answer before Angus Duer should read it to them out of the textbook.
In the midst of their sufferings they had to labor with Fatty Pfaff.
Fatty had failed in the mid-year anatomical, and he had to pass a special quiz before he could take the finals. There was a certain fondness for him in Digamma Pi; Fatty was soft, Fatty was superstitious, Fatty was an imbecile, yet they had for him the annoyed affection they might have had for a second-hand motor or a muddy dog. All of them worked on him; they tried to lift him and thrust him through the examination as through a trap-door. They panted and grunted and moaned at the labor, and Fatty panted and moaned with them.
The night before his special examination they kept him at it till two, with wet towels, black coffee, prayer, and profanity. They repeated lists—lists—lists to him; they shook their fists in his mournful red round face and howled, “Damn you, will you remember that the bicuspid valve is the SAME as the mitral valve and NOT another one?” They ran about the room, holding up their hands and wailing, “Won’t he never remember nothing about nothing?” and charged back to purr with fictive calm, “Now no use getting fussed, Fatty. Take it easy. Just listen to this, quietly, will yuh, and try,” coaxingly, “do try to remember one thing, anyway!”
They led him carefully to bed. He was so filled with facts that the slightest jostling would have spilled them.
When he awoke at seven, with red eyes and trembling lips, he had forgotten everything he had learned.
“There’s nothing for it,” said the president of Digamma Pi. “He’s got to have a crib, and take his chance on getting caught with it. I thought so. I made one out for him yesterday. It’s a lulu. It’ll cover enough of the questions so he’ll get through.”
Even the Reverend Ira Hinkley, since he had witnessed the horrors of the midnight before, went his ways ignoring the crime. It was Fatty himself who protested: “Gee, I don’t like to cheat. I don’t think a fellow that can’t get through an examination had hardly ought to be allowed to practise medicine. That’s what my Dad said.”
They poured more coffee into him and (on the advice of Clif Clawson, who wasn’t exactly sure what the effect might be but who was willing to learn) they fed him a potassium bromide tablet. The president of Digamma, seizing Fatty with some firmness, growled, “I’m going to stick this crib in your pocket—look, here in your breast pocket, behind your handkerchief.”
“I won’t use it. I don’t care if I fail,” whimpered Fatty.
“That’s all right, but you keep it there. Maybe you can absorb a little information from it through your lungs, for God knows—” The president clenched his hair. His voice rose, and in it was all the tragedy of night watches and black draughts and hopeless retreats. “— God knows you can’t take it in through your head!”
They dusted Fatty, they stood him right side up, and pushed him through the door, on his way to Anatomy Building. They watched him go: a balloon on legs, a sausage in corduroy trousers.
“Is it possible he’s going to be honest?” marveled Clif Clawson.
“Well, if he is, we better go up and begin packing his trunk. And this ole frat’ll never have another goat like Fatty,” grieved the president.
They saw Fatty stop, remove his handkerchief, mournfully blow his nose—and discover a long thin slip of paper. They saw him frown at it, tap it on his knuckles, begin to read it, stuff it back into his pocket, and go on with a more resolute step.
They danced hand in hand about the living-room of the fraternity, piously assuring one another, “He’ll use it—it’s all right—he’ll get through or get hanged!”
He got through.
VI
Digamma Pi was more annoyed by Martin’s restless doubtings than by Fatty’s idiocy, Clif Clawson’s raucousness, Angus Duer’s rasping, or the Reverend Ira Hinkley’s nagging.
During the strain of study for examinations Martin was peculiarly vexing in regard to “laying in the best quality medical terms like the best quality sterilizers—not for use but to impress your patients.” As one, the Digams suggested, “Say, if you don’t like the way we study medicine, we’ll be tickled to death to take up a collection and send you back to Elk Mills, where you won’t be disturbed by all us lowbrows and commercialists. Look here! We don’t tell you how you ought to work. Where do you get the idea you got to tell us? Oh, turn it off, will you!”
Angus Duer observed, with sour sweetness, “We’ll admit we’re simply carpenters, and you’re a great investigator. But there’s several things you might turn to when you finish science. What do you know about architecture? How’s your French verbs? How many big novels have you ever read? Who’s the premier of Austro-Hungary?”
Martin struggled, “I don’t pretend to know anything—except I do know what a man like Max Gottlieb means. He’s got the right method, and all these other hams of profs, they’re simply witch doctors. You think Gottlieb isn’t religious, Hinkley. Why, his just being in a lab is a prayer. Don’t you idiots realize what it means to have a man like that here, making new concepts of life? Don’t you—”
Clif Clawson, with a chasm of yawning, speculated, “Praying in the lab! I’ll bet I get the pants took off me, when I take bacteriology, if Pa Gottlieb catches me praying during experiment hours!”
“Damn it, listen!” Martin wailed. “I tell you, you fellows are the kind that keep medicine nothing but guess-work diagnosis, and here you have a man—”
So they argued for hours, after their sweaty fact-grinding.
When the others had gone to bed, when the room was a muck-heap of flung clothing and weary young men snoring in iron bunks, Martin sat at the splintery long pine study-table, worrying. Angus Duer glided in, demanding, “Look here, old son. We’re all sick of your crabbing. If you think medicine is rot, the way we study it, and if you’re so confoundedly honest, why don’t you get out?”
He left Martin to agonize, “He’s right. I’ve got to shut up or get out. Do I really mean it? What do I want? What am I going to do?”
VII
Angus Duer’s studiousness and his reverence for correct manners were alike offended by Clif’s bawdy singing, Clif’s howling conversation, Clif’s fondness for dropping things in people’s soup, and Clif’s melancholy inability to keep his hands washed. For all his appearance of nerveless steadiness, during the tension of examination-time Duer was as nervous as Martin, and one evening at supper, when Clif was bellowing, Duer snapped, “Will you kindly not make so much racket?”
“I’ll make all the damn’ racket I damn’ please!” Clif asserted, and a feud was on.
Clif was so noisy thereafter that he almost became tired of his own noise. He was noisy in the living-room, he was noisy in the bath, and with some sacrifice he lay awake pretending to snore. If Duer was quiet and book-wrapped, he was not in the least timid; he faced Clif with the eye of a magistrate, and cowed him. Privily Clif complained to Martin, “Darn him, he acts like I was a worm. Either he or me has got to get out of Digam, that’s a cinch, and it won’t be me!”
He was ferocious and very noisy about it, and it was he who got out. He said that the Digams were a “bunch of bum sports; don’t even have a decent game of poker,” but he was fleeing from the hard eyes of Angus Duer. And Martin resigned from the fraternity with him, planned to room with him the coming autumn.
Clif’s blustering rubbed Martin as it did Duer. Clif had no reticences; when he was not telling slimy stories he was demanding, “How much chuh pay for those shoes—must think you’re a Vanderbilt!” or “D’I see you walking with that Madeline Fox femme—what chuh tryin’ to do?” But Martin was alienated from the civilized, industrious, nice young men of Digamma Pi, in whose faces he could already see prescriptions, glossy white sterilizers, smart enclosed motors, and glass office-signs in the best gilt lettering. He preferred a barbarian loneliness, for next year he would be working with Max Gottlieb, and he could not be bothered.
That summer he spent with a crew installing telephones in Montana.
He was a lineman in the wire-gang. It was his job to climb the poles, digging the spurs of his leg-irons into the soft and silvery pine, to carry up the wire, lash it to the glass insulators, then down and to another pole.
They made perhaps five miles a day; at night they drove into little rickety wooden towns. Their retiring was simple—they removed their shoes and rolled up in a horse-blanket. Martin wore overalls and a flannel shirt. He looked like a farm-hand. Climbing all day long, he breathed deep, his eyes cleared of worry, and one day he experienced a miracle.
He was atop a pole and suddenly, for no clear cause, his eyes opened and he saw; as though he had just awakened he saw that the prairie was vast, that the sun was kindly on rough pasture and ripening wheat, on the old horses, the easy, broad-beamed, friendly horses, and on his red-faced jocose companions; he saw that the meadow larks were jubilant, and blackbirds shining by little pools, and with the living sun all life was living. Suppose the Angus Duers and Irving Watterses were tight tradesmen. What of it? “I’m here!” he gloated.
The wire-gang were as healthy and as simple as the west wind; they had no pretentiousness; though they handled electrical equipment they did not, like medics, learn a confusion of scientific terms and pretend to the farmers that they were scientists. They laughed easily and were content to be themselves, and with them Martin was content to forget how noble he was. He had for them an affection such as he had for no one at the University save Max Gottlieb.
He carried in his bag one book, Gottlieb’s “Immunology.” He could often get through half a page of it before he bogged down in chemical formulæ. Occasionally, on Sundays or rainy days, he tried to read it, and longed for the laboratory; occasionally he thought of Madeline Fox, and became certain that he was devastatingly lonely for her. But week slipped into careless and robust week, and when he awoke in a stable, smelling the sweet hay and the horses and the lark-ringing prairie that crept near to the heart of these shanty towns, he cared only for the day’s work, the day’s hiking, westward toward the sunset.
So they straggled through the Montana wheatland, whole duchies of wheat in one shining field, through the cattle-country and the sagebrush desert, and suddenly, staring at a persistent cloud, Martin realized that he beheld the mountains.
Then he was on a train; the wire-gang were already forgotten; and he was thinking only of Madeline Fox, Clif Clawson, Angus Duer, and Max Gottlieb.
CHAPTER IV
I
Professor Max Gottlieb was about to assassinate a guinea pig with anthrax germs, and the bacteriology class were nervous.
They had studied the forms of bacteria, they had handled Petri dishes and platinum loops, they had proudly grown on potato slices the harmless red cultures of Bacillus prodigiosus, and they had come now to pathogenic germs and the inoculation of a living animal with swift disease. These two beady-eyed guinea pigs, chittering in a battery jar, would in two days be stiff and dead.
Martin had an excitement not free from anxiety. He laughed at it, he remembered with professional scorn how foolish were the lay visitors to the laboratory, who believed that sanguinary microbes would leap upon them from the mysterious centrifuge, from the benches, from the air itself. But he was conscious that in the cotton-plugged test-tube between the instrument-bath and the bichloride jar on the demonstrator’s desk were millions of fatal anthrax germs.
The class looked respectful and did not stand too close. With the flair of technique, the sure rapidity which dignified the slightest movement of his hands, Dr. Gottlieb clipped the hair on the belly of a guinea pig held by the assistant. He soaped the belly with one flicker of a hand-brush, he shaved it and painted it with iodine.
(And all the while Max Gottlieb was recalling the eagerness of his first students, when he had just returned from working with Koch and Pasteur, when he was fresh from enormous beer seidels and Korpsbrüder and ferocious arguments. Passionate, beautiful days! Die goldene Zeit! His first classes in America, at Queen City College, had been awed by the sensational discoveries in bacteriology; they had crowded about him reverently; they had longed to know. Now the class was a mob. He looked at them— Fatty Pfaff in the front row, his face vacant as a doorknob; the co-eds emotional and frightened; only Martin Arrowsmith and Angus Duer visibly intelligent. His memory fumbled for a pale blue twilight in Munich, a bridge and a waiting girl, and the sound of music.)
He dipped his hands in the bichloride solution and shook them—a quick shake, fingers down, like the fingers of a pianist above the keys. He took a hypodermic needle from the instrument-bath and lifted the test-tube. His voice flowed indolently, with German vowels and blurred W’s:
“This, gentlemen, iss a twenty-four-hour culture of Bacillus anthracis. You will note, I am sure you will have noted already, that in the bottom of the tumbler there was cotton to keep the tube from being broken. I cannot advise breaking tubes of anthrax germs and afterwards getting the hands into the culture. You might merely get anthrax boils—”
The class shuddered.
Gottlieb twitched out the cotton plug with his little finger, so neatly that the medical students who had complained, “Bacteriology is junk; urinalysis and blood tests are all the lab stuff we need to know,” now gave him something of the respect they had for a man who could do card tricks or remove an appendix in seven minutes. He agitated the mouth of the tube in the Bunsen burner, droning, “Every time you take the plug from a tube, flame the mouth of the tube. Make that a rule. It is a necessity of the technique, and technique, gentlemen, is the beginning of all science. It iss also the least-known thing in science.”
The class was impatient. Why didn’t he get on with it, on to the entertainingly dreadful moment of inoculating the pig?
(And Max Gottlieb, glancing at the other guinea pig in the prison of its battery jar, meditated, “Wretched innocent! Why should I murder him, to teach Dummköpfe? It would be better to experiment on that fat young man.”)
He thrust the syringe into the tube, he withdrew the piston dextrously with his index finger, and lectured:
“Take one half c.c. of the culture. There are two kinds of M.D.’s—those to whom c.c. means cubic centimeter and those to whom it means compound cathartic. The second kind are more prosperous.”
(But one cannot convey the quality of it: the thin drawl, the sardonic amiability, the hiss of the S’s, the D’s turned into blunt and challenging T’s.)
The assistant held the guinea pig close; Gottlieb pinched up the skin of the belly and punctured it with a quick down thrust of the hypodermic needle. The pig gave a little jerk, a little squeak, and the co-eds shuddered. Gottlieb’s wise fingers knew when the peritoneal wall was reached. He pushed home the plunger of the syringe. He said quietly, “This poor animal will now soon be dead as Moses.” The class glanced at one another uneasily. “Some of you will think that it does not matter; some of you will think, like Bernard Shaw, that I am an executioner and the more monstrous because I am cool about it; and some of you will not think at all. This difference in philosophy iss what makes life interesting.”
While the assistant tagged the pig with a tin disk in its ear and restored it to the battery jar, Gottlieb set down its weight in a note-book, with the time of inoculation and the age of the bacterial culture. These notes he reproduced on the blackboard, in his fastidious script, murmuring, “Gentlemen, the most important part of living is not the living but pondering upon it. And the most important part of experimentation is not doing the experiment but making notes, ve-ry accurate quantitative notes—in ink. I am told that a great many clever people feel they can keep notes in their heads. I have often observed with pleasure that such persons do not have heads in which to keep their notes. This iss very good, because thus the world never sees their results and science is not encumbered with them. I shall now inoculate the second guinea pig, and the class will be dismissed. Before the next lab hour I shall be glad if you will read Pater’s ‘Marius the Epicurean,’ to derife from it the calmness which is the secret of laboratory skill.”
II
As they bustled down the hall, Angus Duer observed to a brother Digam, “Gottlieb is an old laboratory plug; he hasn’t got any imagination; he sticks here instead of getting out into the world and enjoying the fight. But he certainly is handy. Awfully good technique. He might have been a first-rate surgeon, and made fifty thousand dollars a year. As it is, I don’t suppose he gets a cent over four thousand!”
Ira Hinkley walked alone, worrying. He was an extraordinarily kindly man, this huge and bumbling parson. He reverently accepted everything, no matter how contradictory to everything else, that his medical instructors told him, but this killing of animals—he hated it. By a connection not evident to him he remembered that the Sunday before, in the slummy chapel where he preached during his medical course, he had exalted the sacrifice of the martyrs and they had sung of the blood of the lamb, the fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel’s veins, but this meditation he lost, and he lumbered toward Digamma Pi in a fog of pondering pity.
Clif Clawson, walking with Fatty Pfaff, shouted, “Gosh, ole pig certainly did jerk when Pa Gottlieb rammed that needle home!” and Fatty begged, “Don’t! Please!”
But Martin Arrowsmith saw himself doing the same experiment and, as he remembered Gottlieb’s unerring fingers, his hands curved in imitation.
III
The guinea pigs grew drowsier and drowsier. In two days they rolled over, kicked convulsively, and died. Full of dramatic expectation, the class reassembled for the necropsy. On the demonstrator’s table was a wooden tray, scarred from the tacks which for years had pinned down the corpses. The guinea pigs were in a glass jar, rigid, their hair ruffled. The class tried to remember how nibbling and alive they had been. The assistant stretched out one of them with thumb-tacks. Gottlieb swabbed its belly with a cotton wad soaked in lysol, slit it from belly to neck, and cauterized the heart with a red-hot spatula—the class quivered as they heard the searing of the flesh. Like a priest of diabolic mysteries, he drew out the blackened blood with a pipette. With the distended lungs, the spleen and kidneys and liver, the assistant made wavy smears on glass slides which were stained and given to the class for examination. The students who had learned to look through the microscope without having to close one eye were proud and professional, and all of them talked of the beauty of identifying the bacillus, as they twiddled the brass thumbscrews to the right focus and the cells rose from cloudiness to sharp distinctness on the slides before them. But they were uneasy, for Gottlieb remained with them that day, stalking behind them, saying nothing, watching them always, watching the disposal of the remains of the guinea pigs, and along the benches ran nervous rumors about a bygone student who had died from anthrax infection in the laboratory.
IV
There was for Martin in these days a quality of satisfying delight; the zest of a fast hockey game, the serenity of the prairie, the bewilderment of great music, and a feeling of creation. He woke early and thought contentedly of the day; he hurried to his work, devout, unseeing.
The confusion of the bacteriological laboratory was ecstasy to him—the students in shirt-sleeves, filtering nutrient gelatine, their fingers gummed from the crinkly gelatine leaves; or heating media in an autoclave like a silver howitzer. The roaring Bunsen flames beneath the hot-air ovens, the steam from the Arnold sterilizers rolling to the rafters, clouding the windows, were to Martin lovely with activity, and to him the most radiant things in the world were rows of test-tubes filled with watery serum and plugged with cotton singed to a coffee brown, a fine platinum loop leaning in a shiny test-glass, a fantastic hedge of tall glass tubes mysteriously connecting jars, or a bottle rich with gentian violet stain.
He had begun, perhaps in youthful imitation of Gottlieb, to work by himself in the laboratory at night.... The long room was dark, thick dark, but for the gas-mantle behind his microscope. The cone of light cast a gloss on the bright brass tube, a sheen on his black hair, as he bent over the eyepiece. He was studying trypanosomes from a rat—an eight-branched rosette stained with polychrome methylene blue; a cluster of organisms delicate as a narcissus, with their purple nuclei, their light blue cells, and the thin lines of the flagella. He was excited and a little proud; he had stained the germs perfectly, and it is not easy to stain a rosette without breaking the petal shape. In the darkness, a step, the weary step of Max Gottlieb, and a hand on Martin’s shoulder. Silently Martin raised his head, pushed the microscope toward him. Bending down, a cigarette stub in his mouth—the smoke would have stung the eyes of any human being— Gottlieb peered at the preparation.
He adjusted the gas light a quarter inch, and mused, “Splendid! You have craftsmanship. Oh, there is an art in science—for a few. You Americans, so many of you—all full with ideas, but you are impatient with the beautiful dullness of long labors. I see already—and I watch you in the lab before—perhaps you may try the trypanosomes of sleeping sickness. They are very, very interesting, and very, very tickelish to handle. It is quite a nice disease. In some villages in Africa, fifty per cent. of the people have it, and it is invariably fatal. Yes, I think you might work on the bugs.”
Which, to Martin, was getting his brigade in battle.
“I shall have,” said Gottlieb, “a little sandwich in my room at midnight. If you should happen to work so late, I should be very pleast if you would come to have a bite.”
Diffidently, Martin crossed the hall to Gottlieb’s immaculate laboratory at midnight. On the bench were coffee and sandwiches, curiously small and excellent sandwiches, foreign to Martin’s lunch-room taste.
Gottlieb talked till Clif had faded from existence and Angus Duer seemed but an absurd climber. He summoned forth London laboratories, dinners on frosty evenings in Stockholm, walks on the Pincio with sunset behind the dome of San Pietro, extreme danger and overpowering disgust from excreta-smeared garments in an epidemic at Marseilles. His reserve slipped from him and he talked of himself and of his family as though Martin were a contemporary.
The cousin who was a colonel in Uruguay and the cousin, a rabbi, who was tortured in a pogrom in Moscow. His sick wife—it might be cancer. The three children—the youngest girl, Miriam, she was a good musician, but the boy, the fourteen-year-old, he was a worry; he was saucy, he would not study. Himself, he had worked for years on the synthesis of antibodies; he was at present in a blind alley, and at Mohalis there was no one who was interested, no one to stir him, but he was having an agreeable time massacring the opsonin theory, and that cheered him.
“No, I have done nothing except be unpleasant to people that claim too much, but I have dreams of real discoveries some day. And— No. Not five times in five years do I have students who understand craftsmanship and precision and maybe some big imagination in hypotheses. I t’ink perhaps you may have them. If I can help you— So!
“I do not t’ink you will be a good doctor. Good doctors are fine—often they are artists—but their trade, it is not for us lonely ones that work in labs. Once, I took an M.D. label. In Heidelberg that was— Herr Gott, back in 1875! I could not get much interested in bandaging legs and looking at tongues. I was a follower of Helmholtz—what a wild blithering young fellow! I tried to make researches into the physics of sound— I was bad, most unbelievable, but I learned that in this wale of tears there is nothing certain but the quantitative method. And I was a chemist—a fine stink-maker was I. And so into biology and much trouble. It has been good. I have found one or two things. And if sometimes I feel an exile, cold— I had to get out of Germany one time for refusing to sing Die Wacht am Rhein and trying to kill a cavalry captain—he was a stout fellow— I had to choke him—you see I am boasting, but I was a lifely Kerl thirty years ago! Ah! So!
“There is but one trouble of a philosophical bacteriologist. Why should we destroy these amiable pathogenic germs? Are we too sure, when we regard these oh, most unbeautiful young students attending Y. M. C. A.’s and singing dinkle-songs and wearing hats with initials burned into them—iss it worth while to protect them from the so elegantly functioning Bacillus typhosus with its lovely flagella? You know, once I asked Dean Silva would it not be better to let loose the pathogenic germs on the world, and so solve all economic questions. But he did not care for my met’od. Oh, well, he is older than I am; he also gives, I hear, some dinner parties with bishops and judges present, all in nice clothes. He would know more than a German Jew who loves Father Nietzsche and Father Schopenhauer (but damn him, he was teleological-minded!) and Father Koch and Father Pasteur and Brother Jacques Loeb and Brother Arrhenius. Ja! I talk foolishness. Let us go look at your slides and so good-night.”
When he had left Gottlieb at his stupid brown little house, his face as reticent as though the midnight supper and all the rambling talk had never happened, Martin ran home, altogether drunk.
CHAPTER V
I
Though bacteriology was all of Martin’s life now, it was the theory of the university that he was also studying pathology, hygiene, surgical anatomy, and enough other subjects to swamp a genius.
Clif Clawson and he lived in a large room with flowered wall-paper, piles of filthy clothes, iron beds, and cuspidors. They made their own breakfasts; they dined on hash at the Pilgrim Lunch Wagon or the Dew Drop Inn. Clif was occasionally irritating; he hated open windows; he talked of dirty socks; he sang “Some Die of Diabetes” when Martin was studying; and he was altogether unable to say anything directly. He had to be humorous. He remarked, “Is it your combobulatory concept that we might now feed the old faces?” or “How about ingurgitating a few calories?” But he had for Martin a charm that could not be accounted for by his cheerfulness, his shrewdness, his vague courage. The whole of Clif was more than the sum of his various parts.
In the joy of his laboratory work Martin thought rarely of his recent associates in Digamma Pi. He occasionally protested that the Reverend Ira Hinkley was a village policeman and Irving Watters a plumber, that Angus Duer would walk to success over his grandmother’s head, and that for an idiot like Fatty Pfaff to practise on helpless human beings was criminal, but mostly he ignored them and ceased to be a pest. And when he had passed his first triumphs in bacteriology and discovered how remarkably much he did not know, he was curiously humble.
If he was less annoying in regard to his classmates, he was more so in his classrooms. He had learned from Gottlieb the trick of using the word “control” in reference to the person or animal or chemical left untreated during an experiment, as a standard for comparison; and there is no trick more infuriating. When a physician boasted of his success with this drug or that electric cabinet, Gottlieb always snorted, “Where was your control? How many cases did you have under identical conditions, and how many of them did not get the treatment?” Now Martin began to mouth it—control, control, control, where’s your control? where’s your control?—till most of his fellows and a few of his instructors desired to lynch him.
He was particularly tedious in materia medica.
The professor of materia medica, Dr. Lloyd Davidson, would have been an illustrious shopkeeper. He was very popular. From him a future physician could learn that most important of all things: the proper drugs to give a patient, particularly when you cannot discover what is the matter with him. His classes listened with zeal, and memorized the sacred hundred and fifty favorite prescriptions. (He was proud that this was fifty more than his predecessor had required.)
But Martin was rebellious. He inquired, and publicly, “Dr. Davidson, how do they know ichthyol is good for erysipelas? Isn’t it just rotten fossil fish—isn’t it like the mummy-dust and puppy-ear stuff they used to give in the olden days?”
“How do they know? Why, my critical young friend, because thousands of physicians have used it for years and found their patients getting better, and that’s how they know!”
“But honest, Doctor, wouldn’t the patients maybe have gotten better anyway? Wasn’t it maybe a post hoc, propter hoc? Have they ever experimented on a whole slew of patients together, with controls?”
“Probably not—and until some genius like yourself, Arrowsmith, can herd together a few hundred people with exactly identical cases of erysipelas, it probably never will be tried! Meanwhile I trust that you other gentlemen, who perhaps lack Mr. Arrowsmith’s profound scientific attainments and the power to use such handy technical terms as ‘control,’ will, merely on my feeble advice, continue to use ichthyol!”
But Martin insisted, “Please, Dr. Davidson, what’s the use of getting all these prescriptions by heart, anyway? We’ll forget most of ’em, and besides, we can always look ’em up in the book.”
Davidson pressed his lips together, then:
“Arrowsmith, with a man of your age I hate to answer you as I would a three-year-old boy, but apparently I must. Therefore, you will learn the properties of drugs and the contents of prescriptions because I tell you to! If I did not hesitate to waste the time of the other members of this class, I would try to convince you that my statements may be accepted, not on my humble authority, but because they are the conclusions of wise men—men wiser or certainly a little older than you, my friend—through many ages. But as I have no desire to indulge in fancy flights of rhetoric and eloquence, I shall merely say that you will accept, and you will study, and you will memorize, because I tell you to!”
Martin considered dropping his medical course and specializing in bacteriology. He tried to confide in Clif, but Clif had become impatient of his fretting, and he turned again to the energetic and willowy Madeline Fox.
II
Madeline was at once sympathetic and sensible. Why not complete his medical course, then see what he wanted to do?
They tramped, they skated, they skied, they went to the University Dramatic Society play. Madeline’s widowed mother had come to live with her, and they had taken a top-floor flat in one of the tiny apartment-houses which were beginning to replace the expansive old wooden houses of Mohalis. The flat was full of literature and decoration: a bronze Buddha from Chicago, a rubbing of Shakespeare’s epitaph, a set of Anatole France in translation, a photograph of Cologne cathedral, a wicker tea-table with a samovar whose operation no one in the university understood, and a souvenir post-card album. Madeline’s mother was a Main Street dowager duchess. She was stately and white-haired but she attended the Methodist Church. In Mohalis she was flustered by the chatter of the students; she longed for her home-town, for the church sociables and the meetings of the women’s club—they were studying Education this year and she hated to lose all the information about university ways.
With a home and a chaperone, Madeline began to “entertain”: eight-o’clock parties with coffee, chocolate cake, chicken salad, and word-games. She invited Martin, but he was jealous of his evenings, beautiful evenings of research. The first affair to which she enticed him was her big New Year’s Party in January. They “did advertisements”—guessed at tableaux representing advertising pictures; they danced to the phonograph; and they had not merely a lap-supper but little tables excessively covered with doilies.
Martin was unaccustomed to such elegance. Though he had come in sulky unwillingness, he was impressed by the supper, by the frocks of the young women; he realized that his dancing was rusty, and he envied the senior who could do the new waltz called the “Boston.” There was no strength, no grace, no knowledge, that Martin Arrowsmith did not covet, when consciousness of it had pierced through the layers of his absorption. If he was but little greedy for possessions, he was hungry for every skill.
His reluctant wonder at the others was drowned in his admiration for Madeline. He had known her as a jacketed outdoor girl, but this was an exquisite indoor Madeline, slender in yellow silk. She seemed to him a miracle of tact and ease as she bullied her guests into an appearance of merriment. She had need of tact, for Dr. Norman Brumfit was there, and it was one of Dr. Brumfit’s evenings to be original and naughty. He pretended to kiss Madeline’s mother, which vastly discomforted the poor lady; he sang a strongly improper negro song containing the word hell; he maintained to a group of women graduate students that George Sand’s affairs might perhaps be partially justified by their influence on men of talent; and when they looked shocked, he pranced a little, and his eye-glasses glittered.
Madeline took charge of him. She trilled, “Dr. Brumfit, you’re terribly learned and so on and so forth, and sometimes in English classes I’m simply scared to death of you, but other times you’re nothing but a bad small boy, and I won’t have you teasing the girls. You can help me bring in the sherbet, that’s what you can do.”
Martin adored her. He hated Brumfit for the privilege of disappearing with her into the closet-like kitchen of the flat. Madeline! She was the one person who understood him! Here, where every one snatched at her and Dr. Brumfit beamed on her with almost matrimonial fondness, she was precious, she was something he must have.
On pretense of helping her set the tables, he had a moment with her, and whimpered, “Lord, you’re so lovely!”
“I’m glad you think I’m a wee bit nice.” She, the rose and the adored of all the world, gave him her favor.
“Can I come call on you to-morrow evening?”
III
It cannot be said, in this biography of a young man who was in no degree a hero, who regarded himself as a seeker after truth yet who stumbled and slid back all his life and bogged himself in every obvious morass, that Martin’s intentions toward Madeline Fox were what is called “honorable.” He was not a Don Juan, but he was a poor medical student who would have to wait for years before he could make a living. Certainly he did not think of proposing marriage. He wanted—like most poor and ardent young men in such a case, he wanted all he could get.
As he raced toward her flat, he was expectant of adventure. He pictured her melting; he felt her hand glide down his cheek. He warned himself, “Don’t be a fool now! Probably nothing doing at all. Don’t go get all worked up and then be disappointed. She’ll probably cuss you out for something you did wrong at the party. She’ll probably be sleepy and wish you hadn’t come. Nothing!” But he did not for a second believe it.
He rang, he saw her opening the door, he followed her down the meager hall, longing to take her hand. He came into the over-bright living-room—and he found her mother, solid as a pyramid, permanent-looking as sunless winter.
But of course Mother would obligingly go, and leave him to conquest.
Mother did not.
In Mohalis, the suitable time for young men callers to depart is ten o’clock, but from eight till a quarter after eleven Martin did battle with Mrs. Fox; talked to her in two languages, an audible gossip and a mute but furious protest, while Madeline—she was present; she sat about and looked pretty. In an equally silent tongue Mrs. Fox answered him, till the room was thick with their antagonism, while they seemed to be discussing the weather, the university, and the trolley service into Zenith.
“Yes, of course, some day I guess they’ll have a car every twenty minutes,” he said weightily.
(“Darn her, why doesn’t she go to bed? Cheers! She’s doing up her knitting. Nope. Damn it! She’s taking another ball of wool.”)
“Oh, yes, I’m sure they’ll have to have better service,” said Mrs. Fox.
(“Young man, I don’t know much about you, but I don’t believe you’re the right kind of person for Madeline to go with. Anyway, it’s time you went home.”)
“Oh, yes, sure, you bet. Lot better service.”