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?”
“Well, I-- Perhaps.”
III
It cannot be said, in this biography of a young man who was in no degree
a hero, who regarded himself as a seeker after truth yet who stumbled
and slid back all his life and bogged himself in every obvious morass,
that Martin’s intentions toward Madeline Fox were what is called
“honorable.” He was not a Don Juan, but he was a poor medical student
who would have to wait for years before he could make a living.
Certainly he did not think of proposing marriage. He wanted--like most
poor and ardent young men in such a case, he wanted all he could get.
As he raced toward her flat, he was expectant of adventure. He pictured
her melting; he felt her hand glide down his cheek. He warned himself,
“Don’t be a fool now! Probably nothing doing at all. Don’t go get all
worked up and then be disappointed. She’ll probably cuss you out for
something you did wrong at the party. She’ll probably be sleepy and wish
you hadn’t come. Nothing!” But he did not for a second believe it.
He rang, he saw her opening the door, he followed her down the meager
hall, longing to take her hand. He came into the over-bright
living-room--and he found her mother, solid as a pyramid,
permanent-looking as sunless winter.
But of course Mother would obligingly go, and leave him to conquest.
Mother did not.
In Mohalis, the suitable time for young men callers to depart is ten
o’clock, but from eight till a quarter after eleven Martin did battle
with Mrs. Fox; talked to her in two languages, an audible gossip and a
mute but furious protest, while Madeline--she was present; she sat about
and looked pretty. In an equally silent tongue Mrs. Fox answered him,
till the room was thick with their antagonism, while they seemed to be
discussing the weather, the university, and the trolley service into
Zenith.
“Yes, of course, some day I guess they’ll have a car every twenty
minutes,” he said weightily.
(“Darn her, why doesn’t she go to bed? Cheers! She’s doing up her
knitting. Nope. Damn it! She’s taking another ball of wool.”)
“Oh, yes, I’m sure they’ll have to have better service,” said Mrs. Fox.
(“Young man, I don’t know much about you, but I don’t believe you’re the
right kind of person for Madeline to go with. Anyway, it’s time you went
home.”)
“Oh, yes, sure, you bet. Lot better service.”
(“I know I’m staying too long, and I know you know it, but I don’t
care!”)
It seemed impossible that Mrs. Fox should endure his stolid persistence.
He used thought-forms, will-power, and hypnotism, and when he rose,
defeated, she was still there, extremely placid. They said good-by not
too warmly. Madeline took him to the door; for an exhilarating
half-minute he had her alone.
“I wanted so much-- I wanted to talk to you!”
“I know. I’m sorry. Some time!” she muttered.
He kissed her. It was a tempestuous kiss, and very sweet.
IV
Fudge parties, skating parties, sleighing parties, a literary party with
the guest of honor a lady journalist who did the social page for the
Zenith _Advocate-Times_-- Madeline leaped into an orgy of jocund but
extraordinarily tiring entertainments, and Martin obediently and
smolderingly followed her. She appeared to have trouble in getting
enough men, and to the literary evening Martin dragged the enraged Clif
Clawson. Clif grumbled, “This is the damnedest zoo of sparrows I ever
did time in,” but he bore off treasure--he had heard Madeline call
Martin by her favorite name of “Martykins.” That was very valuable. Clif
called him Martykins. Clif told others to call him Martykins. Fatty
Pfaff and Irving Watters called him Martykins. And when Martin wanted to
go to sleep, Clif croaked:
“Yuh, you’ll probably marry her. She’s a dead shot. She can hit a smart
young M.D. at ninety paces. Oh, you’ll have one fine young time going on
with science after that skirt sets you at tonsil-snatching.... She’s one
of these literary birds. She knows all about lite’ature except maybe how
to read.... She’s not so bad-looking, now. She’ll get fat, like her Ma.”
Martin said that which was necessary, and he concluded, “She’s the only
girl in the graduate school that’s got any pep. The others just sit
around and talk, and she gets up the best parties--”
“Any kissing parties?”
“Now you look here! I’ll be getting sore, first thing you know! You and
I are roughnecks, but Madeline Fox--she’s like Angus Duer, some ways. I
realize all the stuff we’re missing: music and literature, yes, and
decent clothes, too--no harm to dressing well--”
“That’s just what I was tellin’ you! She’ll have you all dolled up in a
Prince Albert and a boiled shirt, diagnosing everything as
rich-widowitis. How you can fall for that four-flushing dame--_Where’s
your control?_”
Clif’s opposition stirred him to consider Madeline not merely with a sly
and avaricious interest but with a dramatic conviction that he longed to
marry her.
V
Few women can for long periods keep from trying to Improve their men,
and To Improve means to change a person from what he is, whatever that
may be, into something else. Girls like Madeline Fox, artistic young
women who do not work at it, cannot be restrained from Improving for
more than a day at a time. The moment the urgent Martin showed that he
was stirred by her graces, she went at his clothes--his corduroys and
soft collars and eccentric old gray felt hat--at his vocabulary and his
taste in fiction, with new and more patronizing vigor. Her sketchy way
of saying, “Why, of course everybody knows that Emerson was the greatest
thinker” irritated him the more in contrast to Gottlieb’s dark patience.
“Oh, let me alone!” he hurled at her. “You’re the nicest thing the Lord
ever made, when you stick to things you know about, but when you spring
your ideas on politics and chemotherapy-- Darn it, quit bullying me! I
guess you’re right about slang. I’ll cut out all this junk about
‘feeding your face’ and so on. But I will not put on a hard-boiled
collar! I won’t!”
He might never have proposed to her but for the spring evening on the
roof.
She used the flat roof of her apartment-house as a garden. She had set
out one box of geraniums and a cast-iron bench like those once beheld
in cemetery plots; she had hung up two Japanese lanterns--they were
ragged and they hung crooked. She spoke with scorn of the other
inhabitants of the apartment-house, who were “so prosaic, so
conventional, that they never came up to this darling hidey-place.” She
compared her refuge to the roof of a Moorish palace, to a Spanish patio,
to a Japanese garden, to a “pleasaunce of old Provençal.” But to Martin
it seemed a good deal like a plain roof. He was vaguely ready for a
quarrel, that April evening when he called on Madeline and her mother
sniffily told him that she was to be found on the roof.
“Damned Japanese lanterns. Rather look at liver-sections,” he grumbled,
as he trudged up the curving stairs.
Madeline was sitting on the funereal iron bench, her chin in her hands.
For once she did not greet him with flowery excitement but with a
noncommittal “Hello.” She seemed spiritless. He felt guilty for his
scoffing; he suddenly saw the pathos in her pretense that this stretch
of tar-paper and slatted walks was a blazing garden. As he sat beside
her he piped, “Say, that’s a dandy new strip of matting you’ve put
down.”
“It is not! It’s mangy!” She turned toward him. She wailed, “Oh, Mart,
I’m so sick of myself, to-night. I’m always trying to make people think
I’m somebody. I’m not. I’m a bluff.”
“What is it, dear?”
“Oh, it’s lots. Dr. Brumfit, hang him--only he was right--he as good as
told me that if I don’t work harder I’ll have to get out of the graduate
school. I’m not doing a thing, he said, and if I don’t have my Ph.D.,
then I won’t be able to land a nice job teaching English in some swell
school, and I’d better land one, too, because it doesn’t look to poor
Madeline as if anybody was going to marry her.”
His arm about her, he blared, “I know exactly who--”
“No, I’m not fishing. I’m almost honest, to-night. I’m no good, Mart. I
tell people how clever I am. And I don’t suppose they believe it.
Probably they go off and laugh at me!”
“They do not! If they did-- I’d like to see anybody that tried
laughing--”
“It’s awfully sweet and dear of you, but I’m not worth it. The poetic
Madeline! With her ree-fined vocabulary! I’m a-- I’m a-- Martin, I’m a
tin-horn sport! I’m everything your friend Clif thinks I am. Oh, you
needn’t tell me. I know what he thinks. And-- I’ll have to go home with
mother, and I can’t stand it, dear, I can’t stand it! I won’t go back!
That town! Never anything doing! The old tabbies, and the beastly old
men, always telling the same old jokes. I won’t!”
Her head was in the hollow of his arm; she was weeping, hard; he was
stroking her hair, not covetously now but tenderly, and he was
whispering:
“Darling! I almost feel as if I dared to love you. You’re going to marry
me and-- Take me couple more years to finish my medical course and
couple in hospital, then we’ll be married and-- By thunder, with you
helping me, I’m going to climb to the top! Be big surgeon! We’re going
to have everything!”
“Dearest, do be wise. I don’t want to keep you from your scientific
work--”
“Oh. Well. Well, I would like to keep up _some_ research. But thunder,
I’m not just a lab-cat. Battle o’ life. Smashing your way through.
Competing with real men in real he-struggle. If I can’t do that and do
some scientific work too, I’m no good. Course while I’m with Gottlieb, I
want to take advantage of it, but afterward-- Oh, Madeline!”
Then was all reasoning lost in a blur of nearness to her.
VI
He dreaded the interview with Mrs. Fox; he was certain that she would
demand, “Young man, how do you expect to support my Maddy? And you use
bad language.” But she took his hand and mourned, “I hope you and my
baby will be happy. She’s a dear good girl, even if she is a little
flighty sometimes, and I know you’re nice and kind and hard-working. I
shall pray you’ll be happy--oh, I’ll pray so hard! You young people
don’t seem to think much of prayer, but if you knew how it helped
me-- Oh, I’ll petition for your sweet happiness!”
She was weeping; she kissed Martin’s forehead with the dry, soft, gentle
kiss of an old woman, and he was near to weeping with her.
At parting Madeline whispered, “Boy, I don’t care a bit, myself, but
Mother would love it if we went to church with her. Don’t you think you
could, just once?”
The astounded world, the astounded and profane Clif Clawson, had the
spectacle of Martin in shiny pressed clothes, a painful linen collar,
and an arduously tied scarf, accompanying Mrs. Fox and the chastely
chattering Madeline to the Mohalis Methodist Church, to hear the
Reverend Dr. Myron Schwab discourse on “The One Way to Righteousness.”
They passed the Reverend Ira Hinkley, and Ira gloated with a holy
gloating at Martin’s captivity.
VII
For all his devotion to Max Gottlieb’s pessimistic view of the human
intellect, Martin had believed that there was such a thing as progress,
that events meant something, that people could learn something, that if
Madeline had once admitted she was an ordinary young woman who
occasionally failed, then she was saved. He was bewildered when she
began improving him more airily than ever. She complained of his
vulgarity and what she asserted to be his slack ambition. “You think
it’s terribly smart of you to feel superior. Sometimes I wonder if it
isn’t just laziness. You like to day-dream around labs. Why should _you_
be spared the work of memorizing your materia medica and so on and so
forth? All the others have to do it. No, I won’t kiss you. I want you to
grow up and listen to reason.”
In fury at her badgering, in desire for her lips and forgiving smile, he
was whirled through to the end of the term.
A week before examinations, when he was trying to spend twenty-four
hours a day in making love to her, twenty-four in grinding for
examinations, and twenty-four in the bacteriological laboratory, he
promised Clif that he would spend that summer vacation with him, working
as a waiter in a Canadian hotel. He met Madeline in the evening, and
with her walked through the cherry orchard on the Agricultural
Experiment Station grounds.
“You know what I think of your horrid Clif Clawson,” she complained. “I
don’t suppose you care to hear my opinion of him.”
“I’ve had your opinion, my beloved.” Martin sounded mature, and not too
pleasant.
“Well, I can tell you right now you haven’t had my opinion of your being
a waiter! For the life of me I can’t understand why you don’t get some
gentlemanly job for vacation, instead of hustling dirty dishes. Why
couldn’t you work on a newspaper, where you’d have to dress decently and
meet nice people?”
“Sure. I might edit the paper. But since you say so, I won’t work at all
this summer. Fool thing to do, anyway. I’ll go to Newport and play golf
and wear a dress suit every night.”
“It wouldn’t hurt you any! I do respect honest labor. It’s like Burns
says. But waiting on table! Oh, Mart, why are you so proud of being a
roughneck? Do stop being smart, for a minute. Listen to the night. And
smell the cherry blossoms.... Or maybe a great scientist like you,
that’s so superior to ordinary people, is too good for cherry blossoms!”
“Well, except for the fact that every cherry blossom has been gone for
weeks now, you’re dead right.”
“Oh, they have, have they! They may be faded but-- Will you be so good
as to tell me what that pale white mass is up there?”
“I will. It looks to me like a hired-man’s shirt.”
“Martin Arrowsmith, if you think for one moment that I’m ever going to
marry a vulgar, crude, selfish, microbe-grubbing smart aleck--”
“And if you think I’m going to marry a dame that keeps nag-nag-naggin’
and jab-jab-jabbin’ at me all day long--”
They hurt each other; they had pleasure in it; and they parted forever,
twice they parted forever, the second time very rudely, near a
fraternity-house where students were singing heart-breaking summer songs
to a banjo.
In ten days, without seeing her again, he was off with Clif to the North
Woods, and in his sorrow of losing her, his longing for her soft flesh
and for her willingness to listen to him, he was only a little excited
that he should have led the class in bacteriology, and that Max Gottlieb
should have appointed him undergraduate assistant for the coming year.