I
The waiters at Nokomis Lodge, among the Ontario pines, were all of them
university students. They were not supposed to appear at the Lodge
dances--they merely appeared, and took the prettiest girls away from the
elderly and denunciatory suitors in white flannels. They had to work but
seven hours a day. The rest of the time they fished, swam, and tramped
the shadowy trails, and Martin came back to Mohalis placid--and
enormously in love with Madeline.
They had written to each other, politely, regretfully, and once a
fortnight; then passionately and daily. For the summer she had been
dragged to her home town, near the Ohio border of Winnemac, a town
larger than Martin’s native Elk Mills but more sun-baked, more barren
with little factories. She sighed, in a huge loose script dashing all
over the page:
Perhaps we shall never see each other again but I do want you to
know how much I prize all the talks we had together about science &
ideals & education, etc.-- I certainly appreciate them here when I
listen to these stick in the muds going on, oh, it is too dreadful,
about their automobiles & how much they have to pay their maids and
so on & so forth. You gave me so much but I did give you something
didn’t I? I can’t always be in the wrong can I?
“My dear, my little girl!” he lamented. “‘Can’t always be in the wrong’!
You poor kid, you poor dear kid!”
By midsummer they were firmly re-engaged and, though he was slightly
disturbed by the cashier, a young and giggling Wisconsin school-teacher
with ankles, he so longed for Madeline that he lay awake thinking of
giving up his job and fleeing to her caresses--lay awake for minutes at
a time.
The returning train was torturingly slow, and he dismounted at Mohalis
fevered with visions of her. Twenty minutes after, they were clinging
together in the quiet of her living-room. It is true that twenty minutes
after that, she was sneering at Clif Clawson, at fishing, and at all
school-teachers, but to his fury she yielded in tears.
II
His Junior year was a whirlwind. To attend lectures on physical
diagnosis, surgery, neurology, obstetrics, and gynecology in the
morning, with hospital demonstrations in the afternoon; to supervise the
making of media and the sterilization of glassware for Gottlieb; to
instruct a new class in the use of microscope and filter and autoclave;
to read a page now and then of scientific German or French; to see
Madeline constantly; to get through it all he drove himself to
hysterical hurrying, and in the dizziest of it he began his first
original research--his first lyric, his first ascent of unexplored
mountains.
He had immunized rabbits to typhoid, and he believed that if he mixed
serum taken from these immune animals with typhoid germs, the germs
would die. Unfortunately--he felt--the germs grew joyfully. He was
troubled; he was sure that his technique had been clumsy; he performed
his experiment over and over, working till midnight, waking at dawn to
ponder on his notes. (Though in letters to Madeline his writing was an
inconsistent scrawl, in his laboratory notes it was precise.) When he
was quite sure that Nature was persisting in doing something she ought
not to, he went guiltily to Gottlieb, protesting, “The darn’ bugs ought
to die in this immune serum, but they don’t. There’s something wrong
with the theories.”
“Young man, do you set yourself up against science?” grated Gottlieb,
flapping the papers on his desk. “Do you feel competent, huh, to attack
the dogmas of immunology?”
“I’m sorry, sir. I can’t help what the dogma is. Here’s my protocols.
Honestly, I’ve gone over and over the stuff, and I get the same results,
as you can see. I only know what I observe.”
Gottlieb beamed. “I give you, my boy, my episcopal blessings! That is
the way! Observe what you observe, and if it does violence to all the
nice correct views of science--out they go! I am very pleast, Martin.
But now find out the Why, the underneath principle.”
Ordinarily, Gottlieb called him “Arrowsmith” or “You” or “Uh.” When he
was furious he called him, or any other student, “Doctor.” It was only
in high moments that he honored him with “Martin,” and the boy trotted
off blissfully, to try to find (but never to succeed in finding) the Why
that made everything so.
III
Gottlieb had sent him into Zenith, to the huge Zenith General Hospital,
to secure a strain of meningococcus from an interesting patient. The
bored reception clerk--who was interested only in obtaining the names,
business addresses, and religions of patients, and did not care who died
or who spat on the beautiful blue and white linoleum or who went about
collecting meningococci, so long as the addresses were properly
entered--loftily told him to go up to Ward D. Through the long hallways,
past numberless rooms from which peered yellow-faced old women sitting
up in bed in linty nightgowns, Martin wandered, trying to look
important, hoping to be taken for a doctor, and succeeding only in
feeling extraordinarily embarrassed.
He passed several nurses rapidly, half nodding to them, in the manner
(or what he conceived to be the manner) of a brilliant young surgeon who
is about to operate. He was so absorbed in looking like a brilliant
young surgeon that he was completely lost, and discovered himself in a
wing filled with private suites. He was late. He had no more time to go
on being impressive. Like all males, he hated to confess ignorance by
asking directions, but grudgingly he stopped at the door of a bedroom in
which a probationer nurse was scrubbing the floor.
She was a smallish and slender probationer, muffled in a harsh blue
denim dress, an enormous white apron, and a turban bound about her head
with an elastic--a uniform as grubby as her pail of scrub-water. She
peered up with the alert impudence of a squirrel.
“Nurse,” he said, “I want to find Ward D.”
Lazily, “Do you?”
“I do! If I can interrupt your work--”
“Doesn’t matter. The damn’ superintendent of nurses put me at scrubbing,
and we aren’t ever _supposed_ to scrub floors, because she caught me
smoking a cigarette. She’s an old terror. If she found a child like you
wandering around here, she’d drag you out by the ear.”
“My _dear_ young woman, it may interest you to know--”
“Oh! ‘My dear young woman, it may--’ Sounds exactly like our old prof,
back home.”
Her indolent amusement, her manner of treating him as though they were
a pair of children making tongues at each other in a railroad station,
was infuriating to the earnest young assistant of Professor Gottlieb.
“I am Dr. Arrowsmith,” he snorted, “and I’ve been informed that even
probationers learn that the first duty of a nurse is to stand when
addressing doctors! I wish to find Ward D, to take a strain of--_it may
interest you to know!_--a very dangerous microbe, and if you will kindly
direct me--”
“Oh, gee, I’ve been getting fresh again. I don’t seem to get along with
this military discipline. All right. I’ll stand up.” She did. Her every
movement was swiftly smooth as the running of a cat. “You go back, turn
right, then left. I’m sorry I was fresh. But if you saw some of the old
muffs of doctors that a nurse has to be meek to-- Honestly, Doctor--if
you _are_ a doctor--”
“I don’t see that I need to convince you!” he raged, as he stalked off.
All the way to Ward D he was furious at her veiled derision. He was an
eminent scientist, and it was outrageous that he should have to endure
impudence from a probationer--a singularly vulgar probationer, a thin
and slangy young woman apparently from the West. He repeated his rebuke:
“I don’t see that I need to convince you.” He was proud of himself for
having been lofty. He pictured himself telling Madeline about it,
concluding, “I just said to her quietly, ‘My dear young woman, I don’t
know that you are the person to whom I have to explain my mission here,’
I said, and she wilted.”
But her image had not wilted, when he had found the intern who was to
help him and had taken the spinal fluid. She was before him,
provocative, enduring. He had to see her again, and convince her--“Take
a better man than she is, better man than I’ve ever met, to get away
with being insulting to _me_!” said the modest young scientist.
He had raced back to her room and they were staring at each other before
it came to him that he had not worked out the crushing things he was
going to say. She had risen from her scrubbing. She had taken off her
turban, and her hair was silky and honey-colored, her eyes were blue,
her face childish. There was nothing of the slavey in her. He could
imagine her running down hillsides, shinning up a stack of straw.
“Oh,” she said gravely. “I didn’t mean to be rude then. I was
just-- Scrubbing makes me bad-tempered. I thought you were awfully nice,
and I’m sorry I hurt your feelings, but you did seem so young for a
doctor.”
“I’m not. I’m a medic. I was showing off.”
“So was I!”
He felt an instant and complete comradeship with her, a relation free
from the fencing and posing of his struggle with Madeline. He knew that
this girl was of his own people. If she was vulgar, jocular, unreticent,
she was also gallant, she was full of laughter at humbugs, she was
capable of a loyalty too casual and natural to seem heroic. His voice
was lively, though his words were only:
“Pretty hard, this training for nursing, I guess.”
“Not so awful, but it’s just as romantic as being a hired girl--that’s
what we call ’em in Dakota.”
“Come from Dakota?”
“I come from the most enterprising town--three hundred and sixty-two
inhabitants--in the entire state of North Dakota-- Wheatsylvania. Are
you in the U. medic school?”
To a passing nurse, the two youngsters would have seemed absorbed in
hospital business. Martin stood at the door, she by her scrubbing pail.
She had reassumed her turban; its bagginess obscured her bright hair.
“Yes, I’m a Junior medic in Mohalis. But-- I don’t know. I’m not much of
a medic. I like the lab side. I think I’ll be a bacteriologist, and
raise Cain with some of the fool theories of immunology. And I don’t
think much of the bedside manner.”
“I’m glad you don’t. You get it here. You ought to hear some of the docs
that are the sweetest old pussies with their patients--the way they bawl
out the nurses. But labs--they seem sort of real. I don’t suppose you
can bluff a bacteria--what is it?--bacterium?”
“No, they’re-- What do they call you?”
“Me? Oh, it’s an idiotic name-- Leora Tozer.”
“What’s the matter with Leora? It’s fine.”
Sound of mating birds, sound of spring blossoms dropping in the tranquil
air, the bark of sleepy dogs at midnight; who is to set them down and
make them anything but hackneyed? And as natural, as conventional, as
youthfully gauche, as eternally beautiful and authentic as those ancient
sounds was the talk of Martin and Leora in that passionate half-hour
when each found in the other a part of his own self, always vaguely
missed, discovered now with astonished joy. They rattled like hero and
heroine of a sticky tale, like sweat-shop operatives, like bouncing
rustics, like prince and princess. Their words were silly and
inconsequential, heard one by one, yet taken together they were as wise
and important as the tides or the sounding wind.
He told her that he admired Max Gottlieb, that he had crossed her North
Dakota on a train, and that he was an excellent hockey-player. She told
him that she “adored” vaudeville, that her father, Andrew Jackson Tozer,
was born in the East (by which she meant Illinois), and that she didn’t
particularly care for nursing. She had no especial personal ambition;
she had come here because she liked adventure. She hinted, with debonair
regret, that she was not too popular with the superintendent of nurses;
she meant to be good but somehow she was always dragged into rebellions
connected with midnight fudge or elopements. There was nothing heroic in
her story but from her placid way of telling it he had an impression of
gay courage.
He interrupted with an urgent, “When can you get away from the hospital
for dinner? To-night?”
“Why--”
“Please!”
“All right.”
“When can I call for you?”
“Do you think I ought to-- Well, seven.”
All the way back to Mohalis he alternately raged and rejoiced. He
informed himself that he was a moron to make this long trip into Zenith
twice in one day; he remembered that he was engaged to a girl called
Madeline Fox; he worried the matter of unfaithfulness; he asserted that
Leora Tozer was merely an imitation nurse who was as illiterate as a
kitchen wench and as impertinent as a newsboy; he decided, several times
he decided, to telephone her and free himself from the engagement.
He was at the hospital at a quarter to seven.
He had to wait for twenty minutes in a reception-room like that of an
undertaker. He was in a panic. What was he doing here? She’d probably be
agonizingly dull, through a whole long dinner. Would he even recognize
her, in mufti? Then he leaped up. She was at the door. Her sulky blue
uniform was gone; she was childishly slim and light in a princess frock
that was a straight line from high collar and soft young breast to her
feet. It seemed natural to tuck her hand under his arm as they left the
hospital. She moved beside him with a little dancing step, shyer now
than she had been in the dignity of her job but looking up at him with
confidence.
“Glad I came?” he demanded.
She thought it over. She had a trick of gravely thinking over obvious
questions; and gravely (but with the gravity of a child, not the
ponderous gravity of a politician or an office-manager) she admitted,
“Yes, I am glad. I was afraid you’d go and get sore at me because I was
so fresh, and I wanted to apologize and-- I liked your being so crazy
about your bacteriology. I think I’m a little crazy, too. The interns
here--they come bothering around a lot, but they’re so sort of--so sort
of _soggy_, with their new stethoscopes and their brand-new dignity.
Oh--” Most gravely of all: “Oh, gee, yes, I’m glad you came.... Am I an
idiot to admit it?”
“You’re a darling to admit it.” He was a little dizzy with her. He
pressed her hand with his arm.
“You won’t think I let every medic and doctor pick me up, will you?”
“Leora! And you don’t think I try and pick up every pretty girl I meet?
I liked-- I felt somehow we two could be chums. Can’t we? Can’t we?”
“I don’t know. We’ll see. Where are we going for dinner?”
“The Grand Hotel.”
“We are not! It’s terribly expensive. Unless you’re awfully rich. You
aren’t, are you?”
“No, I’m not. Just enough money to get through medic school. But I
want--”
“Let’s go to the Bijou. It’s a nice place, and it isn’t expensive.”
He remembered how often Madeline Fox had hinted that it would be a tasty
thing to go to the Grand, Zenith’s most resplendent hotel, but that was
the last time he thought of Madeline that evening. He was absorbed in
Leora. He found in her a casualness, a lack of prejudice, a directness,
surprising in the daughter of Andrew Jackson Tozer. She was feminine but
undemanding; she was never Improving and rarely shocked; she was neither
flirtatious nor cold. She was indeed the first girl to whom he had ever
talked without self-consciousness. It is doubtful if Leora herself had
a chance to say anything, for he poured out his every confidence as a
disciple of Gottlieb. To Madeline, Gottlieb was a wicked old man who
made fun of the sanctities of Marriage and Easter lilies, to Clif, he
was a bore, but Leora glowed as Martin banged the table and quoted his
idol: “Up to the present, even in the work of Ehrlich, most research has
been largely a matter of trial and error, the empirical method, which is
the opposite of the scientific method, by which one seeks to establish a
general law governing a group of phenomena so that he may predict what
will happen.”
He intoned it reverently, staring across the table at her, almost
glaring at her. He insisted, “Do you see where he leaves all these
detail-grubbing, machine-made researchers buzzing in the manure heap
just as much as he does the commercial docs? Do you get him? Do you?”
“Yes, I think I do. Anyway, I get your enthusiasm for him. But please
don’t bully me so!”
“Was I bullying? I didn’t mean to. Only, when I get to thinking about
the way most of these damned profs don’t even know what he’s up to--”
Martin was off again, and if Leora did not altogether understand the
relation of the synthesis of antibodies to the work of Arrhenius, yet
she listened with comfortable pleasure in his zeal, with none of
Madeline Fox’s gently corrective admonitions.
She had to warn him that she must be at the hospital by ten.
“I’ve talked too much! Lord, I hope I haven’t bored you,” he blurted.
“I loved it.”
“And I was so technical, and so noisy-- Oh, I _am_ a chump!”
“I like having you trust me. I’m not ‘earnest,’ and I haven’t any brains
whatever, but I do love it when my menfolks think I’m intelligent enough
to hear what they really think and-- Good night!”
They dined together twice in two weeks, and only twice in that time,
though she telephoned to him, did Martin see his honest affianced,
Madeline.
He came to know all of Leora’s background. Her bedridden grand-aunt in
Zenith, who was her excuse for coming so far to take hospital training.
The hamlet of Wheatsylvania, North Dakota; one street of shanties with
the red grain-elevators at the end. Her father, Andrew Jackson Tozer,
sometimes known as Jackass Tozer; owner of the bank, of the creamery,
and an elevator, therefore the chief person in town; pious at Wednesday
evening prayer-meeting, fussing over every penny he gave to Leora or her
mother. Bert Tozer, her brother; squirrel teeth, a gold eye-glass chain
over his ear, cashier and all the rest of the staff in the one-room bank
owned by his father. The chicken salad and coffee suppers at the United
Brethren Church; German Lutheran farmers singing ancient Teutonic hymns;
the Hollanders, the Bohemians and Poles. And round about the village,
the living wheat, arched above by tremendous clouds. He saw Leora,
always an “odd child,” doing obediently enough the flat household tasks
but keeping snug the belief that some day she would find a youngster
with whom, in whatever danger or poverty, she would behold all the
colored world.
It was at the end of her hesitating effort to make him see her childhood
that he cried, “Darling, you don’t have to tell me about you. I’ve
always known you. I’m not going to let you go, no matter what. You’re
going to marry me--”
They said it with clasping hands, confessing eyes, in that blatant
restaurant. Her first words were:
“I want to call you ‘Sandy.’ Why do I? I don’t know why. You’re as
unsandy as can be, but somehow ‘Sandy’ means you to me and-- Oh, my
dear, I do like you!”
Martin went home engaged to two girls at once.
IV
He had promised to see Madeline the next morning.
By any canon of respectable behavior he should have felt like a low dog;
he assured himself that he must feel like a low dog; but he could not
bring it off. He thought of Madeline’s pathetic enthusiasms: her
“Provençal pleasaunce” and the limp-leather volumes of poetry which she
patted with fond finger-tips; of the tie she had bought for him, and her
pride in his hair when he brushed it like the patent-leather heroes in
magazine illustrations. He mourned that he had sinned against loyalty.
But his agitation broke against the solidity of his union with Leora.
Her companionship released his soul. Even when, as advocate for
Madeline, he pleaded that Leora was a trivial young woman who probably
chewed gum in private and certainly was careless about her nails in
public, her commonness was dear to the commonness that was in himself,
valid as ambition or reverence, an earthy base to her gaiety as it was
to his nervous scientific curiosity.
He was absent-minded in the laboratory, that fatal next day. Gottlieb
had twice to ask him whether he had prepared the new batch of medium,
and Gottlieb was an autocrat, sterner with his favorites than with the
ruck of students. He snarled, “Arrowsmith, you are a moon-calf! My God,
am I to spend my life with _Dummköpfe_? I cannot be always alone,
Martin! Are you going to fail me? Two, three days now you haf not been
keen about work.”
Martin went off mumbling, “I love that man!” In his tangled mood he
catalogued Madeline’s pretenses, her nagging, her selfishness, her
fundamental ignorance. He worked himself up to a state of virtue in
which it was agreeably clear to him that he must throw Madeline over,
entirely as a rebuke. He went to her in the evening prepared to blaze
out at her first complaining, to forgive her finally, but to break their
engagement and make life resolutely simple again.
She did not complain.
She ran to him. “Dear, you’re so tired--your eyes look tired. Have you
been working frightfully hard? I’ve been so sorry you couldn’t come
’round, this week. Dear, you mustn’t kill yourself. Think of all the
years you have ahead to do splendid things in. No, don’t talk. I want
you to rest. Mother’s gone to the movies. Sit here. See, I’ll make you
so comfy with these pillows. Just lean back--go to sleep if you want
to--and I’ll read you ‘The Crock of Gold.’ You’ll love it.”
He was determined that he would not love it and, as he probably had no
sense of humor whatever, it is doubtful whether he appreciated it, but
its differentness aroused him. Though Madeline’s voice was shrill and
cornfieldish after Leora’s lazy softness, she read so eagerly that he
was sick ashamed of his intention to hurt her. He saw that it was she,
with her pretenses, who was the child, and the detached and fearless
Leora who was mature, mistress of a real world. The reproofs with which
he had planned to crush her vanished.
Suddenly she was beside him, begging, “I’ve been so lonely for you, all
week!”
So he was a traitor to both women. It was Leora who had intolerably
roused him; it was really Leora whom he was caressing now; but it was
Madeline who took his hunger to herself, and when she whimpered, “I’m so
glad you’re glad to be here,” he could say nothing. He wanted to talk
about Leora, to shout about Leora, to exult in her, his woman. He
dragged out a few sound but unimpassioned flatteries; he observed that
Madeline was a handsome young woman and a sound English scholar; and
while she gaped with disappointment at his lukewarmness, he got himself
away, at ten. He had finally succeeded very well indeed in feeling like
a low dog.
He hastened to Clif Clawson.
He had told Clif nothing about Leora. He resented Clif’s probable
scoffing. He thought well of himself for the calmness with which he came
into their room. Clif was sitting on the small of his back, shoeless
feet upon the study table, reading a Sherlock Holmes story which rested
on the powerful volume of Osler’s Medicine which he considered himself
to be reading.
“Clif! Want a drink. Tired. Let’s sneak down to Barney’s and see if we
can rustle one.”
“Thou speakest as one having tongues and who putteth the speed behind
the ole rhombencephalon comprising the cerebellum and the medulla
oblongata.”
“Oh, cut out the cuteness! I’m in a bad temper.”
“Ah, the laddy has been having a scrap with his chaste lil Madeline! Was
she horrid to ickly Martykins? All right. I’ll quit. Come on. Yoicks for
the drink.”
He told three new stories about Professor Robertshaw, all of them
scurrilous and most of them untrue, on their way, and he almost coaxed
Martin into cheerfulness. “Barney’s” was a pool-room, a tobacco shop
and, since Mohalis was dry by local option, an admirable blind-pig. Clif
and the hairy-handed Barney greeted each other in a high and worthy
manner:
“The benisons of eventide to you, Barney. May your circulation proceed
unchecked and particularly the dorsal carpal branch of the ulnar artery,
in which connection, comrade, Prof. Dr. Col. Egbert Arrowsmith and I
would fain trifle with another bottle of that renowned strawberry pop.”
“Gosh, Clif, you cer’nly got a swell line of jaw-music. If I ever need
a’ arm amputated when you get to be a doc, I’ll come around and let you
talk it off. Strawberry pop, gents?”
The front room of Barney’s was an impressionistic painting in which a
pool-table, piles of cigarettes, chocolate bars, playing cards, and pink
sporting papers were jumbled in chaos. The back room was simpler: cases
of sweet and thinly flavored soda, a large ice-box, and two small tables
with broken chairs. Barney poured, from a bottle plainly marked Ginger
Ale, two glasses of powerful and appallingly raw whisky, and Clif and
Martin took them to the table in the corner. The effect was swift.
Martin’s confused sorrows turned to optimism. He told Clif that he was
going to write a book exposing idealism, but what he meant was that he
was going to do something clever about his dual engagement. He had it!
He would invite Leora and Madeline to lunch together, tell them the
truth, and see which of them loved him. He whooped, and had another
whisky; he told Clif that he was a fine fellow, and Barney that he was a
public benefactor, and unsteadily he retired to the telephone, which was
shut off from public hearing in a closet.
At the Zenith General Hospital he got the night superintendent, and the
night superintendent was a man frosty and suspicious. “This is no time
to be calling up a probationer! Half-past eleven! Who are you, anyway?”
Martin checked the “I’ll damn’ soon tell you who I am!” which was his
natural reaction, and explained that he was speaking for Leora’s invalid
grand-aunt, that the poor old lady was very low, and if the night
superintendent cared to take upon himself the murder of a blameless
gentlewoman--
When Leora came to the telephone he said quickly, and soberly now,
feeling as though he had come from the menace of thronging strangers
into the security of her presence:
“Leora? Sandy. Meet me Grand lobby to-morrow, twelve-thirty. Must!
Important! Fix ’t somehow--your aunt’s sick.”
“All right, dear. G’ night,” was all she said.
It took him long minutes to get an answer from Madeline’s flat, then
Mrs. Fox’s voice sounded, sleepily, quaveringly:
“Yes, yes?”
“’S Martin.”
“Who is it Who is it? What is it? Are you calling the Fox apartment?”
“Yes, yes! Mrs. Fox, it’s Martin Arrowsmith speaking.”
“Oh, oh, my dear! The ’phone woke me out of a sound sleep, and I
couldn’t make out what you were saying. I was so frightened. I thought
maybe it was a telegram or something. I thought perhaps something had
happened to Maddy’s brother. What is it, dear? Oh, I do hope nothing’s
happened!”
Her confidence in him, the affection of this uprooted old woman
bewildered in a strange land, overcame him; he lost all his
whisky-colored feeling that he was a nimble fellow, and in a melancholy
way, with all the weight of life again upon him, he sighed that no,
nothing had happened, but he’d forgotten to tell Madeline something--so
shor--so sorry call so late--could he speak Mad just minute--
Then Madeline was bubbling, “Why, Marty dear, what is it? I do hope
nothing has happened! Why, dear, you just left here--”
“Listen, d-dear. Forgot to tell you. There’s a--there’s a great friend
of mine in Zenith that I want you to meet--”
“Who is he?”
“You’ll see to-morrow. Listen, I want you come in and meet--come meet um
at lunch. Going,” with ponderous jocularity, “going to blow you all to a
swell feed at the Grand--”
“Oh, how nice!”
“--so I want you to meet me at the eleven-forty interurban, at College
Square. Can you?”
Vaguely, “Oh, I’d love to but-- I have an eleven o’clock, and I don’t
like to cut it, and I promised May Harmon to go shopping with her--she’s
looking for some kind of shoes that you can wear with her pink crêpe de
chine but that you can walk in--and we sort of thought maybe we might
lunch at Ye Kollege Karavanserai--and I’d half planned to go to the
movies with her or somebody, Mother says that new Alaska film is simply
dandy, she saw it to-night, and I thought I might go see it before they
take it off, though Heaven knows I ought to come right home and study
and not go anywhere at all--”
“Now _listen_! It’s important. Don’t you trust me? Will you come or
not?”
“Why, of course I trust you, dear. All right, I’ll try to be there. The
eleven-forty?”
“Yes.”
“At College Square? Or at Bluthman’s Book Shop?”
“_At College Square!_”
Her gentle “I trust you” and her wambling “I’ll try to” were warring in
his ears as he plunged out of the suffocating cell and returned to Clif.
“What’s the grief?” Clif wondered. “Wife passed away? Or did the Giants
win in the ninth? Barney, our wandering-boy-to-night looks like a
necropsy. Slip him another strawberry pop, quick. Say, Doctor, I think
you better call a physician.”
“Oh, shut up,” was all Martin had to say, and that without conviction.
Before telephoning he had been full of little brightnesses; he had
praised Clif’s pool-playing and called Barney “old _Cimex lectularius_”;
but now, while the affectionate Clif worked on him, he sat brooding save
when he grumbled (with a return of self-satisfaction), “If you knew all
the troubles I have--all the doggone mess a fellow can get into--_you’d_
feel down in the mouth!”
Clif was alarmed. “Look here, old socks. If you’ve gotten in debt, I’ll
raise the cash, somehow. If it’s-- Been going a little too far with
Madeline?”
“You make me sick! You’ve got a dirty mind. I’m not worthy to touch
Madeline’s hand. I regard her with nothing but respect.”
“The hell you do! But never mind, if you say so. Gosh, wish there was
_something_ I could do for you. Oh! Have ’nother shot! Barney! Come
a-runnin’!”
By several drinks Martin was warmed into a hazy carelessness, and Clif
solicitously dragged him home after he had desired to fight three large
academic sophomores. But in the morning he awoke with a crackling skull
and a realization that he was going to face Leora and Madeline at lunch.
V
His half-hour journey with Madeline into Zenith seemed a visible and
oppressing thing, like a tornado cloud. He had not merely to get through
each minute as it came; the whole grim thirty minutes were present at
the same time. While he was practising the tactful observation he was
going to present two minutes from now, he could still hear the clumsy
thing he had said two minutes before. He fought to keep her attention
from the “great friend of his” whom they were to meet. With fatuous
beaming he described a night at Barney’s; without any success whatever
he tried to be funny; and when Madeline lectured him on the evils of
liquor and the evils of association with immoral persons, he was for
once relieved. But he could not sidetrack her.
“Who is this man we’re going to see? What are you so mysterious about?
Oh, Martykins, is it a joke? Aren’t we going to meet anybody? Did you
just want to run away from Mama for a while and we have a bat at the
Grand together? Oh, what fun! I’ve always wanted to lunch at the Grand.
Of course I do think it’s too sort of rococo, but still, it is
impressive, and-- Did I guess it, darling?”
“No, there’s some one-- Oh, we’re going to meet somebody, all right!”
“Then why don’t you tell me who he is? Honestly, Mart, you make me
impatient.”
“Well, I’ll tell you. It isn’t a Him; it’s a Her.”
“Oh!”
“It’s-- You know my work takes me to the hospitals, and some of the
nurses at Zenith General have been awfully helpful.” He was panting. His
eyes ached. Since the torture of the coming lunch was inevitable, he
wondered why he should go on trying to resist his punishment.
“Especially there’s one nurse there who’s a wonder. She’s learned so
much about the care of the sick, and she puts me onto a lot of good
stunts, and she seems like a nice girl-- Miss Tozer, her name is-- I
think her first name is Lee or something like that--and she’s so--her
father is one of the big men in North Dakota--awfully rich--big
banker-- I guess she just took up nursing to do her share in the world’s
work.” He had achieved Madeline’s own tone of poetic uplift. “I thought
you two might like to know each other. You remember you were saying how
few girls there are in Mohalis that really appreciate--appreciate
ideals.”
“Ye-es.” Madeline gazed at something far away and, whatever it was, she
did not like it. “I shall be ver’ pleased to meet her, of course. _Any_
friend of yours-- Oh, Mart! I do hope you don’t flirt; I hope you don’t
get too friendly with all these nurses. I don’t know anything about it,
of course, but I keep hearing how some of these nurses are regular
manhunters.”
“Well, let me tell you right now, Leora isn’t!”
“No, I’m sure, but-- Oh, Martykins, you won’t be silly and let these
nurses just amuse themselves with you? I mean, for your own sake. They
have such an advantage. Poor Madeline, she wouldn’t be allowed to go
hanging around men’s rooms learning--things, and you think you’re so
psychological, Mart, but honestly, any smart woman can twist you around
her finger.”
“Well, I guess I can take care of myself!”
“Oh, I mean-- I don’t mean-- But I do hope this Tozer person-- I’m sure
I shall like her, if you do, but-- I am your own true love, aren’t I,
always!”
She, the proper, ignored the passengers as she clasped his hand. She
sounded so frightened that his anger at her reflections on Leora turned
into misery. Incidentally, her thumb was gouging painfully into the back
of his hand. He tried to look tender as he protested, “Sure--sure--gosh,
honest, Mad, look out. That old duffer across the aisle is staring at
us.”
For whatever infidelities he might ever commit he was adequately
punished before they had reached the Grand Hotel.
The Grand was, in 1907, the best hotel in Zenith. It was compared by
traveling salesmen to the Parker House, the Palmer House, the West
Hotel. It has been humbled since by the supercilious modesty of the vast
Hotel Thornleigh; dirty now is its tessellated floor and all the wild
gilt tarnished, and in its ponderous leather chairs are torn seams and
stogie ashes and horse-dealers. But in its day it was the proudest inn
between Chicago and Pittsburg; an oriental palace, the entrance a score
of brick Moorish arches, the lobby towering from a black and white
marble floor, up past gilt iron balconies, to the green, pink, pearl,
and amber skylight seven stories above.
They found Leora in the lobby, tiny on an enormous couch built round a
pillar. She stared at Madeline, quiet, waiting. Martin perceived that
Leora was unusually sloppy--his own word. It did not matter to him how
clumsily her honey-colored hair was tucked under her black hat, a
characterless little mushroom of a hat, but he did see and resent the
contrast between her shirtwaist, with the third button missing, her
checked skirt, her unfortunate bright brown bolero jacket, and
Madeline’s sleekness of blue serge. The resentment was not toward Leora.
Scanning them together (not haughtily, as the choosing and lofty male,
but anxiously) he was more irritated than ever by Madeline. That she
should be better dressed was an affront. His affection flew to guard
Leora, to wrap and protect her.
And all the while he was bumbling:
“--thought you two girls ought know each other-- Miss Fox, want t’ make
you ’quainted with Miss Tozer--little celebration--lucky dog have two
Queens of Sheba--”
And to himself, “Oh, hell!”
While they murmured nothing in particular to each other he herded them
into the famous dining-room of the Grand. It was full of gilt
chandeliers, red plush chairs, heavy silverware, and aged negro
retainers with gold and green waistcoats. Round the walls ran select
views of Pompeii, Venice, Lake Como, and Versailles.
“Swell room!” chirped Leora.
Madeline had looked as though she intended to say the same thing in
longer words, but she considered the frescoes all over again and
explained, “Well, it’s very large--”
He was ordering, with agony. He had appropriated four dollars for the
orgy, strictly including the tip, and his standard of good food was that
he must spend every cent of the four dollars. While he wondered what
“Purée St. Germain” could be, and the waiter hideously stood watching
behind his shoulder, Madeline fell to. She chanted with horrifying
politeness:
“Mr. Arrowsmith tells me you are a nurse, Miss-- Tozer.”
“Yes, sort of.”
“Do you find it interesting?”
“Well--yes--yes, I think it’s interesting.”
“I suppose it must be wonderful to relieve suffering. Of course my
work-- I’m taking my Doctor of Philosophy degree in English--” She made
it sound as though she were taking her earldom--“it’s rather dry and
detached. I have to master the growth of the language and so on and so
forth. With your practical training, I suppose you’d find that rather
stupid.”
“Yes, it must be--no, it must be very interesting.”
“Do you come from Zenith, Miss-- Tozer?”
“No, I come from-- Just a little town. Well, hardly a town ... North
Dakota.”
“Oh! North Dakota!”
“Yes ... Way West.”
“Oh, yes.... Are you staying East for some time?” It was precisely what
a much-resented New York cousin had once said to Madeline.
“Well, I don’t-- Yes, I guess I may be here quite some time.”
“Do you, uh, do you find you like it here?”
“Oh, yes, it’s pretty nice. These big cities-- So much to see.”
“‘Big’? Well, I suppose it all depends on the point of view, _doesn’t_
it? I always think of New York as big but-- Of course-- Do you find the
contrast to North Dakota interesting?”
“Well, of course it’s different.”
“Tell me what North Dakota’s like. I’ve always wondered about these
Western states.” It was Madeline’s second plagiarism of her cousin.
“What is the general impression it makes on you?”
“I don’t think I know just how you mean.”
“I mean what is the general effect? The--_impression_.”
“Well, it’s got lots of wheat and lots of Swedes.”
“But I mean-- I suppose you’re all terribly virile and energetic,
compared with us Easterners.”
“I don’t-- Well, yes, maybe.”
“Have you met lots of people in Zenith?”
“Not so _awfully_ many.”
“Oh, have you met Dr. Birchall, that operates in your hospital? He’s
such a nice man, and not just a good surgeon but frightfully talented.
He sings won-derfully, and he comes from the most frightfully nice
family.”
“No, I don’t think I’ve met him yet,” Leora bleated.
“Oh, you must. And he plays the slickest--the most gorgeous game of
tennis. He always goes to all these millionaire parties on Royal Ridge.
Frightfully smart.”
Martin now first interrupted. “Smart? Him? He hasn’t got any brains
whatever.”
“My dear child, I didn’t mean ‘smart’ in that sense!” He sat alone and
helpless while she again turned on Leora and ever more brightly inquired
whether Leora knew this son of a corporation lawyer and that famous
débutante, this hat-shop and that club. She spoke familiarly of what
were known as the Leaders of Zenith Society, the personages who appeared
daily in the society columns of the _Advocate-Times_, the Cowxes and
Van Antrims and Dodsworths. Martin was astonished by the familiarity; he
remembered that she had once gone to a charity ball in Zenith but he had
not known that she was so intimate with the peerage. Certainly Leora had
appallingly never heard of these great ones, nor ever attended the
concerts, the lectures, the recitals at which Madeline apparently spent
all her glittering evenings.
Madeline shrugged a little, then, “Well-- Of course with the fascinating
doctors and everybody that you meet in the hospital, I suppose you’d
find lectures frightfully tame. Well--” She dismissed Leora and looked
patronizingly at Martin. “Are you planning some more work on the
what-is-it with rabbits?”
He was grim. He could do it now, if he got it over quickly. “Madeline!
Brought you two together because-- Don’t know whether you cotton to each
other or not, but I wish you could, because I’ve-- I’m not making any
excuses for myself. I couldn’t help it. I’m engaged to both of you, and
I want to know--”
Madeline had sprung up. She had never looked quite so proud and fine.
She stared at them, and walked away, wordless. She came back, she
touched Leora’s shoulder, and quietly kissed her. “Dear, I’m sorry for
you. You’ve got a job! You poor baby!” She strode away, her shoulders
straight.
Hunched, frightened, Martin could not look at Leora.
He felt her hand on his. He looked up. She was smiling, easy, a little
mocking. “Sandy, I warn you that I’m never going to give you up. I
suppose you’re as bad as She says; I suppose I’m foolish-- I’m a hussy.
But you’re mine! I warn you it isn’t a bit of use your getting engaged
to somebody else again. I’d tear her eyes out! Now don’t think so well
of yourself! I guess you’re pretty selfish. But I don’t care. You’re
mine!”
He said brokenly many things beautiful in their commonness.
She pondered, “I do feel we’re nearer together than you and Her. Perhaps
you like me better because you can bully me--because I tag after you and
She never would. And I know your work is more important to you than I
am, maybe more important than you are. But I am stupid and ordinary and
She isn’t. I simply admire you frightfully (Heaven knows why, but I
do), while She has sense enough to make you admire Her and tag after
Her.”
“No! I swear it isn’t because I can bully you, Leora-- I swear it
isn’t-- I don’t think it is. Dearest, don’t, _don’t_ think she’s
brighter than you are. She’s glib but-- Oh, let’s stop talking! I’ve
found you! My life’s begun!”