I
With none of the profane observations on “medical pedlers” which had
annoyed Digamma Pi, Martin studied the catalogue of the New Idea
Instrument and Furniture Company, of Jersey City. It was a handsome
thing. On the glossy green cover, in red and black, were the portraits
of the president, a round quippish man who loved all young physicians;
the general manager, a cadaverous scholarly man who surely gave all his
laborious nights and days to the advancement of science; and the
vice-president, Martin’s former preceptor, Dr. Roscoe Geake, who had a
lively, eye-glassed, forward-looking modernity all his own. The cover
also contained, in surprisingly small space, a quantity of poetic prose,
and the inspiring promise:
Doctor, don’t be buffaloed by the unenterprising. No reason why YOU
should lack the equipment which impresses patients, makes practise
easy, and brings honor and riches. All the high-class supplies
which distinguish the Leaders of the Profession from the Dubs are
within YOUR reach right NOW by the famous New Idea Financial
System: ‘Just a little down and the rest FREE--out of the increased
earnings which New Idea apparatus will bring you!”
Above, in a border of laurel wreaths and Ionic capitals, was the
challenge:
Sing not the glory of soldiers or explorers or statesmen for who
can touch the doctor--wise, heroic, uncontaminated by common greed.
Gentlemen, we salute you humbly and herewith offer you the most
up-to-the-jiffy catalogue ever presented by any surgical supply
house.
The back cover, though it was less glorious with green and red, was
equally arousing. It presented illustrations of the Bindledorf
Tonsillectomy Outfit and of an electric cabinet, with the demand:
Doctor, are you sending your patients off to specialists for tonsil
removal or to sanitoriums for electric, etc., treatment? If so, you
are losing the chance to show yourself one of the distinguished
powers in the domain of medical advancement in your locality, and
losing a lot of big fees. Don’t you WANT to be a high-class
practitioner? Here’s the Open Door.
The Bindledorf Outfit is not only useful but exquisitely beautiful,
adorns and gives class to any office. We guarantee that by the
installation of a Bindledorf Outfit and a New Idea Panaceatic
Electro-Therapeutic Cabinet (see details on pp. 34 and 97) you can
increase your income from a thousand to ten thousand annually and
please patients more than by the most painstaking plugging.
When the Great Call sounds, Doctor, and it’s time for you to face
your reward, will you be satisfied by a big Masonic funeral and
tributes from Grateful Patients if you have failed to lay up
provision for the kiddies, and faithful wife who has shared your
tribulations?
You may drive through blizzard and August heat, and go down into
the purple-shadowed vale of sorrow and wrestle with the
ebon-cloaked Powers of Darkness for the lives of your patients, but
that heroism is incomplete without Modern Progress, to be obtained
by the use of a Bindledorf Tonsillectomy Outfit and the New Idea
Panaceatic Cabinet, to be obtained on small payment down, rest on
easiest terms known in history of medicine!
II
This poetry of passion Martin neglected, for his opinion of poetry was
like his opinion of electric cabinets, but excitedly he ordered a steel
stand, a sterilizer, flasks, test-tubes, and a white-enameled mechanism
with enchanting levers and gears which transformed it from
examining-chair to operating-table. He yearned over the picture of a
centrifuge while Leora was admiring the “stunning seven-piece Reception
Room fumed oak set, upholstered in genuine Barcelona Longware
Leatherette, will give your office the class and distinction of any
high-grade New York specialist’s.”
“Aw, let ’em sit on plain chairs,” Martin grunted.
In the attic Mrs. Tozer found enough seedy chairs for the
reception-room, and an ancient bookcase which, when Leora had lined it
with pink fringed paper, became a noble instrument-cabinet. Till the
examining-chair should arrive, Martin would use Wise’s lumpy couch, and
Leora busily covered it with white oilcloth. Behind the front room of
the tiny office-building were two cubicles, formerly bedroom and
kitchen. Martin made them into consultation-room and laboratory.
Whistling, he sawed out racks for the glassware and turned the oven of a
discarded kerosene stove into a hot-air oven for sterilizing glassware.
“But understand, Lee, I’m not going to go monkeying with any scientific
research. I’m through with all that.”
Leora smiled innocently. While he worked she sat outside in the long
wild grass, sniffing the prairie breeze, her hands about her ankles, but
every quarter-hour she had to come in and admire.
Mr. Tozer brought home a package at suppertime. The family opened it,
babbling. After supper Martin and Leora hastened with the new treasure
to the office and nailed it in place. It was a plate-glass sign; on it
in gold letters, “M. Arrowsmith, M.D.” They looked up, arms about
each other, squealing softly, and in reverence he grunted,
“There--by--jiminy!”
They sat on the back stoop, exulting in freedom from Tozers. Along the
railroad bumped a freight train with a cheerful clanking. The fireman
waved to them from the engine, a brakeman from the platform of the red
caboose. After the train there was silence but for the crickets and a
distant frog.
“I’ve never been so happy,” he murmured.
III
He had brought from Zenith his own Ochsner surgical case. As he laid out
the instruments he admired the thin, sharp, shining bistoury, the strong
tenotome, the delicate curved needles. With them was a dental forceps.
Dad Silva had warned his classes, “Don’t forget the country doctor often
has to be not only physician but dentist, yes, and priest, divorce
lawyer, blacksmith, chauffeur, and road engineer, and if you are too
lily-handed for those trades, don’t get out of sight of a trolley line
and a beauty parlor.” And the first patient whom Martin had in the new
office, the second patient in Wheatsylvania, was Nils Krag, the
carpenter, roaring with an ulcerated tooth. This was a week before the
glass sign was up, and Martin rejoiced to Leora, “Begun already! You’ll
see ’em tumbling in now.”
They did not see them tumbling in. For ten days Martin tinkered at his
hot-air oven or sat at his desk, reading and trying to look busy. His
first joy passed into fretfulness, and he could have yelped at the
stillness, the inactivity.
Late one afternoon, when he was in a melancholy way preparing to go
home, into the office stamped a grizzled Swedish farmer who grumbled,
“Doc, I got a fish-hook caught in my thumb and it’s all swole.” To
Arrowsmith, intern in Zenith General Hospital with its out-patient
clinic treating hundreds a day, the dressing of a hand had been less
important than borrowing a match, but to Dr. Arrowsmith of Wheatsylvania
it was a hectic operation, and the farmer a person remarkable and very
charming. Martin shook his left hand violently and burbled, “Now if
there’s anything, you just ’phone me--you just ’phone me.”
There had been, he felt, a rush of admiring patients sufficient to
justify them in the one thing Leora and he longed to do, the thing about
which they whispered at night: the purchase of a motor car for his
country calls.
They had seen the car at Frazier’s store.
It was a Ford, five years old, with torn upholstery, a gummy motor, and
springs made by a blacksmith who had never made springs before. Next to
the chugging of the gas engine at the creamery, the most familiar sound
in Wheatsylvania was Frazier’s closing the door of his Ford. He banged
it flatly at the store, and usually he had to shut it thrice again
before he reached home.
But to Martin and Leora, when they had tremblingly bought the car and
three new tires and a horn, it was the most impressive vehicle on earth.
It was their own; they could go when and where they wished.
During his summer at a Canadian hotel Martin had learned to drive the
Ford station wagon, but it was Leora’s first venture. Bert had given her
so many directions that she had refused to drive the family Overland.
When she first sat at the steering wheel, when she moved the
hand-throttle with her little finger and felt in her own hands all this
power, sorcery enabling her to go as fast as she might desire (within
distinct limits), she transcended human strength, she felt that she
could fly like the wild goose--and then in a stretch of sand she killed
the engine.
Martin became the demon driver of the village. To ride with him was to
sit holding your hat, your eyes closed, waiting for death. Apparently he
accelerated for corners, to make them more interesting. The sight of
anything on the road ahead, from another motor to a yellow pup, stirred
in him a frenzy which could be stilled only by going up and passing it.
The village adored, “The Young Doc is quite some driver, all right.”
They waited, with amiable interest, to hear that he had been killed. It
is possible that half of the first dozen patients who drifted into his
office came because of awe at his driving ... the rest because there was
nothing serious the matter, and he was nearer than Dr. Hesselink at
Groningen.
IV
With his first admirers he developed his first enemies.
When he met the Norbloms on the street (and in Wheatsylvania it is
difficult not to meet every one on the street every day), they glared.
Then he antagonized Pete Yeska.
Pete conducted what he called a “drug store,” devoted to the sale of
candy, soda water, patent medicines, fly paper, magazines,
washing-machines, and Ford accessories, yet Pete would have starved if
he had not been postmaster also. He alleged that he was a licensed
pharmacist but he so mangled prescriptions that Martin burst into the
store and addressed him piously.
“You young docs make me sick,” said Pete. “I was putting up
prescriptions when you was in the cradle. The old doc that used to be
here sent everything to me. My way o’ doing things suits me, and I don’t
figure on changing it for you or any other half-baked young
string-bean.”
Thereafter Martin had to purchase drugs from St. Paul, overcrowd his
tiny laboratory, and prepare his own pills and ointments, looking in a
homesick way at the rarely used test-tubes and the dust gathering on the
bell glass of his microscope, while Pete Yeska joined with the Norbloms
in whispering, “This new doc here ain’t any good. You better stick to
Hesselink.”
V
So blank, so idle, had been the week that when he heard the telephone at
the Tozers’, at three in the morning, he rushed to it as though he were
awaiting a love message.
A hoarse and shaky voice: “I want to speak to the doctor.”
“Yuh--yuh-- ’S the doctor speaking.”
“This is Henry Novak, four miles northeast, on the Leopolis road. My
little girl, Mary, she has a terrible sore throat. I think maybe it is
croup and she look awful and-- Could you come right away?”
“You bet. Be right there.”
Four miles--he would do it in eight minutes.
He dressed swiftly, dragging his worn brown tie together, while Leora
beamed over the first night call. He furiously cranked the Ford, banged
and clattered past the station and into the wheat prairie. When he had
gone six miles by the speedometer, slackening at each rural box to look
for the owner’s name, he realized that he was lost. He ran into a farm
driveway and stopped under the willows, his headlight on a heap of
dented milk-cans, broken harvester wheels, cordwood, and bamboo
fishing-poles. From the barn dashed a woolly anomalous dog, barking
viciously, leaping up at the car.
A frowsy head protruded from a ground-floor window. “What you want?”
screamed a Scandinavian voice.
“This is The Doctor. Where does Henry Novak live?”
“Oh! The Doctor! Dr. Hesselink?”
“No! Dr. Arrowsmith.”
“Oh. Dr. Arrowsmith. From Wheatsylvania? Um. Well, you went right near
his place. You yoost turn back one mile and turn to the right by the
brick schoolhouse, and it’s about forty rods up the road--the house with
a cement silo. Somebody sick by Henry’s?”
“Yuh--yuh--girl’s got croup--thanks--”
“Yoost keep to the right. You can’t miss it.”
Probably no one who has listened to the dire “you can’t miss it” has
ever failed to miss it.
Martin swung the Ford about, grazing a slashed chopping-block; he
rattled up the road, took the corner that side of the schoolhouse
instead of this, ran half a mile along a boggy trail between pastures,
and stopped at a farmhouse. In the surprising fall of silence, cows were
to be heard feeding, and a white horse, startled in the darkness, raised
its head to wonder at him. He had to arouse the house with wild
squawkings of his horn, and an irate farmer who bellowed, “Who’s there?
I’ve got a shotgun!” sent him back to the country road.
It was forty minutes from the time of the telephone call when he rushed
into a furrowed driveway and saw on the doorstep, against the lamplight,
a stooped man who called, “The Doctor? This is Novak.”
He found the child in a newly finished bedroom of white plastered walls
and pale varnished pine. Only an iron bed, a straight chair, a chromo of
St. Anne, and a shadeless hand-lamp on a rickety stand broke the staring
shininess of the apartment, a recent extension of the farmhouse. A
heavy-shouldered woman was kneeling by the bed. As she lifted her wet
red face, Novak urged:
“Don’t cry now; he’s here!” And to Martin: “The little one is pretty bad
but we done all we could for her. Last night and to-night we steam her
throat, and we put her here in our own bedroom!”
Mary was a child of seven or eight. Martin found her lips and
finger-tips blue, but in her face no flush. In the effort to expel her
breath she writhed into terrifying knots, then coughed up saliva dotted
with grayish specks. Martin worried as he took out his clinical
thermometer and gave it a professional-looking shake.
It was, he decided, laryngeal croup or diphtheria. Probably diphtheria.
No time now for bacteriological examination, for cultures and leisurely
precision. Silva the healer bulked in the room, crowding out Gottlieb
the inhuman perfectionist. Martin leaned nervously over the child on the
tousled bed, absent-mindedly trying her pulse again and again. He felt
helpless without the equipment of Zenith General, its nurses and Angus
Duer’s sure advice. He had a sudden respect for the lone country doctor.
He had to make a decision, irrevocable, perhaps perilous. He would use
diphtheria antitoxin. But certainly he could not obtain it from Pete
Yeska’s in Wheatsylvania.
Leopolis?
“Hustle up and get me Blassner, the druggist at Leopolis, on the
’phone,” he said to Novak, as calmly as he could contrive. He pictured
Blassner driving through the night, respectfully bringing the antitoxin
to The Doctor. While Novak bellowed into the farm-line telephone, in the
dining-room, Martin waited--waited--staring at the child; Mrs. Novak
waited for him to do miracles; the child’s tossing and hoarse gasping
became horrible; and the glaring walls, the glaring lines of pale yellow
woodwork, hypnotized him into sleepiness. It was too late for anything
short of antitoxin or tracheotomy. Should he operate; cut into the
wind-pipe that she might breathe? He stood and worried; he drowned in
sleepiness and shook himself awake. He had to do something, with the
mother kneeling there, gaping at him, beginning to look doubtful.
“Get some hot cloths--towels, napkins--and keep ’em around her neck. I
wish to God he’d get that telephone call!” he fretted.
As Mrs. Novak, padding on thick slippered feet, brought in the hot
cloths, Novak appeared with a blank “Nobody sleeping at the drug store,
and Blassner’s house-line is out of order.”
“Then listen. I’m afraid this may be serious. I’ve got to have
antitoxin. Going to drive t’ Leopolis and get it. You keep up these hot
applications and-- Wish we had an atomizer. And room ought to be
moister. Got ’n alcohol stove? Keep some water boiling in here. No use
of medicine. B’ right back.”
He drove the twenty-four miles to Leopolis in thirty-seven minutes. Not
once did he slow down for a cross-road. He defied the curves, the roots
thrusting out into the road, though always one dark spot in his mind
feared a blow-out and a swerve. The speed, the casting away of all
caution, wrought in him a high exultation, and it was blessed to be in
the cool air and alone, after the strain of Mrs. Novak’s watching. In
his mind all the while was the page in Osler regarding diphtheria, the
very picture of the words: “In severe cases the first dose should be
from 8,000--” No. Oh, yes: “--from 10,000 to 15,000 units.”
He regained confidence. He thanked the god of science for antitoxin and
for the gas motor. It was, he decided, a Race with Death.
“I’m going to do it--going to pull it off and save that poor kid!” he
rejoiced.
He approached a grade crossing and hurled toward it, ignoring possible
trains. He was aware of a devouring whistle, saw sliding light on the
rails, and brought up sharp. Past him, ten feet from his front wheels,
flung the Seattle Express like a flying volcano. The fireman was
stoking, and even in the thin clearness of coming dawn the glow from the
fire-box was appalling on the under side of the rolling smoke. Instantly
the apparition was gone and Martin sat trembling, hands trembling on the
little steering-wheel, foot trembling like St. Vitus’s dance on the
brake. “That was an awful’ close thing!” he muttered, and thought of a
widowed Leora, abandoned to Tozers. But the vision of the Novak child,
struggling for each terrible breath, overrode all else. “Hell! I’ve
killed the engine!” he groaned. He vaulted over the side, cranked the
car, and dashed into Leopolis.
To Crynssen County, Leopolis with its four thousand people was a
metropolis, but in the pinched stillness of the dawn it was a tiny
graveyard: Main Street a sandy expanse, the low shops desolate as huts.
He found one place astir; in the bleak office of the Dakota Hotel the
night clerk was playing poker with the ’bus-driver and the town
policeman.
They wondered at his hysterical entrance.
“Dr. Arrowsmith, from Wheatsylvania. Kid dying from diphtheria. Where’s
Blassner live? Jump in my car and show me.”
The constable was a lanky old man, his vest swinging open over a
collarless shirt, his trousers in folds, his eyes resolute. He guided
Martin to the home of the druggist, he kicked the door, then, standing
with his lean and bristly visage upraised in the cold early light, he
bawled, “Ed! Hey, you, Ed! Come out of it!”
Ed Blassner grumbled from the up-stairs window. To him, death and
furious doctors had small novelty. While he drew on his trousers and
coat he was to be heard discoursing to his drowsy wife on the woes of
druggists and the desirability of moving to Los Angeles and going into
real estate. But he did have diphtheria antitoxin in his shop, and
sixteen minutes after Martin’s escape from being killed by a train he
was speeding to Henry Novak’s.
VI
The child was still alive when he came bruskly into the house.
All the way back he had seen her dead and stiff. He grunted “Thank God!”
and angrily called for hot water. He was no longer the embarrassed cub
doctor but the wise and heroic physician who had won the Race with
Death, and in the peasant eyes of Mrs. Novak, in Henry’s nervous
obedience, he read his power.
Swiftly, smoothly, he made intravenous injection of the antitoxin, and
stood expectant.
The child’s breathing did not at first vary, as she choked in the labor
of expelling her breath. There was a gurgle, a struggle in which her
face blackened, and she was still. Martin peered, incredulous. Slowly
the Novaks began to glower, shaky hands at their lips. Slowly they knew
the child was gone.
In the hospital, death had become indifferent and natural to Martin. He
had said to Angus, he had heard nurses say one to another, quite
cheerfully, “Well, fifty-seven has just passed out.” Now he raged with
desire to do the impossible. She _couldn’t_ be dead. He’d do
something-- All the while he was groaning, “I should’ve operated-- I
should have.” So insistent was the thought that for a time he did not
realize that Mrs. Novak was clamoring, “She is dead? Dead?”
He nodded, afraid to look at the woman.
“You killed her, with that needle thing! And not even tell us, so we
could call the priest!”
He crawled past her lamentations and the man’s sorrow, and drove home,
empty of heart.
“I shall never practise medicine again,” he reflected.
“I’m through,” he said to Leora. “I’m no good. I should of operated. I
can’t face people, when they know about it. I’m through. I’ll go get a
lab job-- Dawson Hunziker or some place.”
Salutary was the tartness with which she protested, “You’re the most
conceited man that ever lived! Do you think you’re the only doctor that
ever lost a patient? I know you did everything you could.” But he went
about next day torturing himself, the more tortured when Mr. Tozer
whined at supper, “Henry Novak and his woman was in town to-day. They
say you ought to have saved their girl. Why didn’t you give your mind to
it and manage to cure her somehow? Ought to tried. Kind of too bad,
because the Novaks have a lot of influence with all these Pole and Hunky
farmers.”
After a night when he was too tired to sleep, Martin suddenly drove to
Leopolis.
From the Tozers he had heard almost religious praise of Dr. Adam Winter
of Leopolis, a man of nearly seventy, the pioneer physician of Crynssen
County, and to this sage he was fleeing. As he drove he mocked furiously
his melodramatic Race with Death, and he came wearily into the
dust-whirling Main Street. Dr. Winter’s office was above a grocery, in a
long “block” of bright red brick stores with an Egyptian cornice--of
tin. The darkness of the broad hallway was soothing after the prairie
heat and incandescence. Martin had to wait till three respectful
patients had been received by Dr. Winter, a hoary man with a sympathetic
bass voice, before he was admitted to the consultation-room.
The examining-chair was of doubtful superiority to that once used by Doc
Vickerson of Elk Mills, and sterilizing was apparently done in a
wash-bowl, but in a corner was an electric therapeutic cabinet with more
electrodes and pads than Martin had ever seen.
He told the story of the Novaks, and Winter cried, “Why, Doctor, you did
everything you could have and more too. Only thing is, next time, in a
crucial case, you better call some older doctor in consultation--not
that you need his advice, but it makes a hit with the family, it divides
the responsibility, and keeps ’em from going around criticizing. I, uh,
I frequently have the honor of being called by some of my younger
colleagues. Just wait. I’ll ’phone the editor of the _Gazette_ and give
him an item about the case.”
When he had telephoned, Dr. Winter shook hands ardently. He indicated
his electric cabinet. “Got one of those things yet? Ought to, my boy.
Don’t know as I use it very often, except with the cranks that haven’t
anything the matter with ’em, but say, it would surprise you how it
impresses folks. Well, Doctor, welcome to Crynssen County. Married?
Won’t you and your wife come take dinner with us some Sunday noon? Mrs.
Winter will be real pleased to meet you. And if I ever can be of service
to you in a consultation-- I only charge a very little more than my
regular fee, and it looks so well, talking the case over with an older
man.”
Driving home, Martin fell into vain and wicked boasting:
“You bet I’ll stick to it! At worst, I’ll never be as bad as that
snuffling old fee-splitter!”
Two weeks after, the _Wheatsylvania Eagle_, a smeary four-page rag,
reported:
Our enterprising contemporary, the _Leopolis Gazette_, had as
follows last week to say of one of our townsmen who we recently
welcomed to our midst.
“Dr. M. Arrowsmith of Wheatsylvania is being congratulated, we are
informed by our valued pioneer local physician, Dr. Adam Winter, by
the medical fraternity all through the Pony River Valley, there
being no occupation or profession more unselfishly appreciative of
each other’s virtues than the medical gentlemen, on the courage and
enterprise he recently displayed in addition to his scientific
skill.
“Being called to attend the little daughter of Henry Norwalk of
near Delft the well-known farmer and finding the little one near
death with diphtheria he made a desperate attempt to save it by
himself bringing antitoxin from Blassner our ever popular druggist,
who had on hand a full and fresh supply. He drove out and back in
his gasoline chariot, making the total distance of 48 miles in 79
minutes.
“Fortunately our ever alert policeman, Joe Colby, was on the job
and helped Dr. Arrowsmith find Mr. Blassner’s bungalow on Red River
Avenue and this gentleman rose from bed and hastened to supply the
doctor with the needed article but unfortunately the child was
already too low to be saved but it is by such incidents of pluck
and quick thinking as well as knowledge which make the medical
profession one of our greatest blessings.”
Two hours after this was published, Miss Agnes Ingleblad came in for
another discussion of her non-existent ailments, and two days later
Henry Novak appeared, saying proudly:
“Well, Doc, we all done what we could for the poor little girl, but I
guess I waited too long calling you. The woman is awful’ cut up. She and
I was reading that piece in the _Eagle_ about it. We showed it to the
priest. Say, Doc, I wish you’d take a look at my foot. I got kind of a
rheumatic pain in the ankle.”