I
The Boardman Box Factory was afire. All South Zenith was agitated by the
glare on the low-hung clouds, the smell of scorched timber, the infernal
bells of charging fire-apparatus. Miles of small wooden houses west of
the factory were threatened, and shawled women, tousled men in trousers
over nightshirts, tumbled out of bed and came running with a thick
mutter of footsteps in the night-chilled streets.
With professional calmness, firemen in helmets were stoking the dripping
engines. Policemen tramped in front of the press of people, swinging
their clubs, shouting, “Get back there, you!” The fire-line was sacred.
Only the factory-owner and the reporters were admitted. A crazy-eyed
factory-hand was stopped by a police sergeant.
“My tools are in there!” he shrieked.
“That don’t make no never-minds,” bawled the strutting sergeant.
“_Nobody_ can’t get through here!”
But one got through. They heard the blang-blang-blang of a racing
ambulance, incessant, furious, defiant. Without orders, the crowd
opened, and through them, almost grazing them, slid the huge gray car.
At the back, haughty in white uniform, nonchalant on a narrow seat, was
The Doctor-- Martin Arrowsmith.
The crowd admired him, the policemen sprang to receive him.
“Where’s the fireman got hurt?” he snapped.
“Over in that shed,” cried the police sergeant, running beside the
ambulance.
“Drive over closer. Nev’ mind the smoke!” Martin barked at the driver.
A lieutenant of firemen led him to a pile of sawdust on which was
huddled an unconscious youngster, his face bloodless and clammy.
“He got a bad dose of smoke from the green lumber and keeled over. Fine
kid. Is he a goner?” the lieutenant begged.
Martin knelt by the man, felt his pulse, listened to his breathing.
Brusquely opening a black bag, he gave him a hypodermic of strychnin and
held a vial of ammonia to his nose. “He’ll come around. Here, you two,
getum into the ambulance--hustle!”
The police sergeant and the newest probationer patrolman sprang
together, and together they mumbled, “All right, Doc.”
To Martin came the chief reporter of the _Advocate-Times_. In years he
was only twenty-nine, but he was the oldest and perhaps the most cynical
man in the world. He had interviewed senators; he had discovered graft
in charity societies and even in prize-fights. There were fine wrinkles
beside his eyes, he rolled Bull Durham cigarettes constantly, and his
opinion of man’s honor and woman’s virtue was but low. Yet to Martin, or
at least to The Doctor, he was polite.
“Will he pull through, Doc?” he twanged.
“Sure, I think so. Suffocation. Heart’s still going.”
Martin yelped the last words from the step at the back of the
ambulance as it went bumping and rocking through the factory yard,
through the bitter smoke, toward the shrinking crowd. He owned
and commanded the city, he and the driver. They ignored traffic
regulations, they disdained the people, returning from theaters and
movies, who dotted the streets which unrolled before the flying
gray hood. Let ’em get out of the way! The traffic officer at
Chickasaw and Twentieth heard them coming, speeding like the Midnight
Express--urrrrrr--blang-blang-blang-blang--and cleared the noisy
corner. People were jammed against the curb, threatened by rearing
horses and backing motors, and past them hurled the ambulance,
blang-blang-blang-blang, with The Doctor holding a strap and swinging
easily on his perilous seat.
At the hospital the hall-man cried, “Shooting case in the Arbor, Doc.”
“All right. Wait’ll I sneak in a drink,” said Martin placidly.
On the way to his room he passed the open door of the hospital
laboratory, with its hacked bench, its lifeless rows of flasks and
test-tubes.
“Huh! That stuff! Poking ’round labs! This is real sure-enough life,” he
exulted, and he did not permit himself to see the vision of Max Gottlieb
waiting there, so gaunt, so tired, so patient.
II
The six interns in Zenith General, including Martin and Angus Duer,
lived in a long dark room with six camp beds, and six bureaus fantastic
with photographs and ties and undarned socks. They spent hours sitting
on their beds, arguing surgery versus internal medicine, planning the
dinners which they hoped to enjoy on their nights off, and explaining to
Martin, as the only married man, the virtues of the various nurses with
whom, one by one, they fell in love.
Martin found the hospital routine slightly dull. Though he developed the
Intern’s Walk, that quick corridor step with the stethoscope conspicuous
in the pocket, he did not, he could not, develop the bedside manner. He
was sorry for the bruised, yellowed, suffering patients, always changing
as to individuals and never changing as a mass of drab pain, but when he
had thrice dressed a wound, he had had enough; he wanted to go on to new
experiences. Yet the ambulance work outside the hospital was endlessly
stimulating to his pride.
The Doctor, and The Doctor alone, was safe by night in the slum called
“the Arbor.” His black bag was a pass. Policemen saluted him,
prostitutes bowed to him without mockery, saloon-keepers called out,
“Evenin’, Doc,” and hold-up men stood back in doorways to let him pass.
Martin had power, the first obvious power in his life. And he was led
into incessant adventure.
He took a bank-president out of a dive; he helped the family conceal the
disgrace; he irritably refused their bribe; and afterward, when he
thought of how he might have dined with Leora, he was sorry he had
refused it. He broke into hotel-rooms reeking with gas and revived
would-be suicides. He drank Trinidad rum with a Congressman who
advocated prohibition. He attended a policeman assaulted by strikers,
and a striker assaulted by policemen. He assisted at an emergency
abdominal operation at three o’clock in the morning. The
operating-room--white tile walls and white tile floor and glittering
frosted-glass skylight--seemed lined with fire-lit ice, and the large
incandescents glared on the glass instrument cases, the cruel little
knives. The surgeon, in long white gown, white turban, and pale orange
rubber gloves, made his swift incision in the square of yellowish flesh
exposed between towels, cutting deep into layers of fat, and Martin
looked on unmoved as the first blood menacingly followed the cut. And a
month after, during the Chaloosa River flood, he worked for seventy-six
hours, with half-hours of sleep in the ambulance or on a police-station
table.
He landed from a boat at what had been the second story of a tenement
and delivered a baby on the top floor; he bound up heads and arms for a
line of men; but what gave him glory was the perfectly foolhardy feat of
swimming the flood to save five children marooned and terrified on a
bobbing church pew. The newspapers gave him large headlines, and when he
had returned to kiss Leora and sleep twelve hours, he lay and thought
about research with salty self-defensive scorn.
“Gottlieb, the poor old impractical fusser! I’d like to see him swim
that current!” jeered Dr. Arrowsmith to Martin.
But on night duty, alone, he had to face the self he had been afraid to
uncover, and he was homesick for the laboratory, for the thrill of
uncharted discoveries, the quest below the surface and beyond the
moment, the search for fundamental laws which the scientist (however
blasphemously and colloquially he may describe it) exalts above
temporary healing as the religious exalts the nature and terrible glory
of God above pleasant daily virtues. With this sadness there was envy
that he should be left out of things, that others should go ahead of
him, ever surer in technique, more widely aware of the phenomena of
biological chemistry, more deeply daring to explain laws at which the
pioneers had but fumbled and hinted.
In his second year of internship, when the thrills of fires and floods
and murder became as obvious a routine as bookkeeping, when he had seen
the strangely few ways in which mankind can contrive to injure
themselves and slaughter one another, when it was merely wearing to have
to live up to the pretentiousness of being The Doctor, Martin tried to
satisfy and perhaps kill his guilty scientific lust by voluntary
scrabbling about the hospital laboratory, correlating the blood counts
in pernicious anemia. His trifling with the drug of research was risky.
Amid the bustle of operations he began to picture the rapt quietude of
the laboratory. “I better cut this out,” he said to Leora, “if I’m going
to settle down in Wheatsylvania and ’tend to business and make a
living--and I by golly am!”
Dean Silva often came to the hospital on consultations. He passed
through the lobby one evening when Leora, returned from the office where
she was a stenographer, was meeting Martin for dinner. Martin introduced
them, and the little man held her hand, purred at her, and squeaked,
“Will you children give me the pleasure of taking you to dinner? My wife
has deserted me. I am a lone and misanthropic man.”
He trotted between them, round and happy. Martin and he were not student
and teacher, but two doctors together, for Dean Silva was one pedagogue
who could still be interested in a man who no longer sat at his feet. He
led the two starvelings to a chop-house and in a settle-walled booth he
craftily stuffed them with roast goose and mugs of ale.
He concentrated on Leora, but his talk was of Martin:
“Your husband must be an Artist Healer, not a picker of trifles like
these laboratory men.”
“But Gottlieb’s no picker of trifles,” insisted Martin.
“No-o. But with him-- It’s a difference of one’s gods. Gottlieb’s gods
are the cynics, the destroyers--crapehangers, the vulgar call ’em:
Diderot and Voltaire and Elser; great men, wonder-workers, yet men that
had more fun destroying other people’s theories than creating their own.
But my gods now, they’re the men who took the discoveries of Gottlieb’s
gods and turned them to the use of human beings--made them come alive!
“All credit to the men who invented paint and canvas, but there’s more
credit, eh? to the Raphaels and Holbeins who used those discoveries!
Laënnec and Osler, those are the men! It’s all very fine, this business
of pure research: seeking the truth, unhampered by commercialism or
fame-chasing. Getting to the bottom. Ignoring consequences and practical
uses. But do you realize if you carry that idea far enough, a man could
justify himself for doing nothing but count the cobblestones on
Warehouse Avenue--yes, and justify himself for torturing people just to
see how they screamed--and then sneer at a man who was making millions
of people well and happy!
“No, no! Mrs. Arrowsmith, this lad Martin is a passionate fellow, not a
drudge. He must be passionate on behalf of mankind. He’s chosen the
highest calling in the world, but he’s a feckless, experimental devil.
You must keep him at it, my dear, and not let the world lose the benefit
of his passion.”
After this solemnity Dad Silva took them to a musical comedy and sat
between them, patting Martin’s shoulder, patting Leora’s arm, choking
with delight when the comedian stepped into the pail of whitewash. In
midnight volubility Martin and Leora sputtered their affection for him,
and saw their Wheatsylvania venture as glory and salvation.
But a few days before the end of Martin’s internship and their migration
to North Dakota, they met Max Gottlieb on the street.
Martin had not seen him for more than a year; Leora never. He looked
worried and ill. While Martin was agonizing as to whether to pass with a
bow, Gottlieb stopped.
“How is everything, Martin?” he said cordially. But his eyes said, “Why
have you never come back to me?”
The boy stammered something, nothing, and when Gottlieb had gone by,
stooped and moving as in pain, he longed to run after him.
Leora was demanding, “Is that the Professor Gottlieb you’re always
talking about?”
“Yes. Say! How does he strike you?”
“I don’t-- Sandy, he’s the greatest man I’ve ever seen! I don’t know how
I know, but he is! Dr. Silva is a darling, but that was a _great_ man! I
wish-- I wish we were going to see him again. There’s the first man I
ever laid eyes on that I’d leave you for, if he wanted me. He’s so--oh,
he’s like a sword--no, he’s like a brain walking. Oh, Sandy, he looked
so wretched. I wanted to cry. I’d black his shoes!”
“God! So would I!”
But in the bustle of leaving Zenith, the excitement of the journey to
Wheatsylvania, the scramble of his state examinations, the dignity of
being a Practising Physician, he forgot Gottlieb, and on that Dakota
prairie radiant in early June, with meadow larks on every fence post, he
began his work.