I
When he had practised medicine in Wheatsylvania for one year, Martin was
an inconspicuous but not discouraged country doctor. In summer Leora and
he drove to the Pony River for picnic suppers and a swim, very noisy,
splashing, and immodest; through autumn he went duck-hunting with Bert
Tozer, who became nearly tolerable when he stood at sunset on a pass
between two slews; and with winter isolating the village in a sun-blank
desert of snow, they had sleigh-rides, card-parties, “sociables” at the
churches.
When Martin’s flock turned to him for help, their need and their patient
obedience made them beautiful. Once or twice he lost his temper with
jovial villagers who bountifully explained to him that he was less aged
than he might have been; once or twice he drank too much whisky at poker
parties in the back room of the Coöperative Store; but he was known as
reliable, skilful, and honest--and on the whole he was rather less
distinguished than Alec Ingleblad the barber, less prosperous than Nils
Krag, the carpenter, and less interesting to his neighbors than the
Finnish garageman.
Then one accident and one mistake made him famous for full twelve miles
about.
He had gone fishing, in the spring. As he passed a farmhouse a woman ran
out shrieking that her baby had swallowed a thimble and was choking to
death. Martin had for surgical kit a large jack-knife. He sharpened it
on the farmer’s oilstone, sterilized it in the tea-kettle, operated on
the baby’s throat, and saved its life.
Every newspaper in the Pony River Valley had a paragraph, and before
this sensation was over he cured Miss Agnes Ingleblad of her desire to
be cured.
She had achieved cold hands and a slow circulation, and he was called at
midnight. He was soggily sleepy, after two country drives on muddy
roads, and in his torpor he gave her an overdose of strychnin, which so
shocked and stimulated her that she decided to be well. It was so
violent a change that it made her more interesting than being an
invalid--people had of late taken remarkably small pleasure in her
symptoms. She went about praising Martin, and all the world said, “I
hear this Doc Arrowsmith is the only fellow Agnes ever doctored with
that’s done her a mite of good.”
He gathered a practise small, sound, and in no way remarkable. Leora and
he moved from the Tozers’ to a cottage of their own, with a
parlor-dining-room which displayed a nickeled stove on bright, new,
pleasant-smelling linoleum, and a goldenoak sideboard with a souvenir
match-holder from Lake Minnetonka. He bought a small Roentgen ray
outfit; and he was made a director of the Tozer bank. He became too busy
to long for his days of scientific research, which had never existed,
and Leora sighed:
“It’s fierce, being married. I did expect I’d have to follow you out on
the road and be a hobo, but I never expected to be a Pillar of the
Community. Well, I’m too lazy to look up a new husband. Only I warn you:
when you become the Sunday School superintendent, you needn’t expect me
to play the organ and smile at the cute jokes you make about Willy’s not
learning his Golden Text.”
II
So did Martin stumble into respectability.
In the autumn of 1912, when Mr. Debs, Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Wilson, and Mr.
Taft were campaigning for the presidency, when Martin Arrowsmith had
lived in Wheatsylvania for a year and a half, Bert Tozer became a
Prominent Booster. He returned from the state convention of the Modern
Woodmen of America with notions. Several towns had sent boosting
delegations to the convention, and the village of Groningen had turned
out a motor procession of five cars, each with an enormous pennant,
“Groningen for White Men and Black Dirt.”
Bert came back clamoring that every motor in town must carry a
Wheatsylvania pennant. He had bought thirty of them, and they were on
sale at the bank at seventy-five cents apiece. This, Bert explained to
every one who came into the bank, was exactly cost-price, which was
within eleven cents of the truth. He came galloping at Martin, demanding
that he be the first to display a pennant.
“I don’t want one of those fool things flopping from my ’bus,” protested
Martin. “What’s the idea, anyway?”
“What’s the _idea_? To advertise your own town, of course!”
“What is there to advertise? Do you think you’re going to make strangers
believe Wheatsylvania is a metropolis like New York or Jimtown by
hanging a dusty rag behind a second-hand tin lizzie?”
“You never did have any patriotism! Let me tell you, Mart, if you don’t
put on a banner I’ll see to it that everybody in town notices it!”
While the other rickety cars of the village announced to the world, or
at least to several square miles of the world, that Wheatsylvania was
the “Wonder Town of Central N. D.,” Martin’s clattering Ford went bare;
and when his enemy Norblom remarked, “I like to see a fellow have some
public spirit and appreciate the place he gets his money outa,” the
citizenry nodded and spat, and began to question Martin’s fame as a
worker of miracles.
III
He had intimates--the barber, the editor of the _Eagle_, the
garageman--to whom he talked comfortably of hunting and the crops, and
with whom he played poker. Perhaps he was too intimate with them. It was
the theory of Crynssen County that it was quite all right for a young
professional man to take a timely drink providing he kept it secret and
made up for it by yearning over the clergy of the neighborhood. But with
the clergy Martin was brief, and his drinking and poker he never
concealed.
If he was bored by the United Brethren minister’s discourse on doctrine,
on the wickedness of movies, and the scandalous pay of pastors, it was
not at all because he was a distant and supersensitive young man but
because he found more savor in the garageman’s salty remarks on the art
of remembering to ante in poker.
Through all the state there were celebrated poker players,
rustic-looking men with stolid faces, men who sat in shirt-sleeves,
chewing tobacco; men whose longest remark was “By me,” and who delighted
to plunder the gilded and condescending traveling salesmen. When there
was news of a “big game on,” the county sports dropped in silently and
went to work--the sewing-machine agent from Leopolis, the undertaker
from Vanderheide’s Grove, the bootlegger from St. Luke, the red fat man
from Melody who had no known profession.
Once (still do men tell of it gratefully, up and down the Valley), they
played for seventy-two unbroken hours, in the office of the
Wheatsylvania garage. It had been a livery-stable; it was littered with
robes and long whips, and the smell of horses mingled with the reek of
gasoline.
The players came and went, and sometimes they slept on the floor for an
hour or two, but they were never less than four in the game. The stink
of cheap feeble cigarettes and cheap powerful cigars hovered about the
table like a malign spirit; the floor was scattered with stubs, matches,
old cards, and whisky bottles. Among the warriors were Martin, Alec
Ingleblad the barber, and a highway engineer, all of them stripped to
flannel undershirts, not moving for hour on hour, ruffling their cards,
eyes squinting and vacant.
When Bert Tozer heard of the affair, he feared for the good fame of
Wheatsylvania, and to every one he gossiped about Martin’s evil ways and
his own patience. Thus it happened that while Martin was at the height
of his prosperity and credit as a physician, along the Pony River Valley
sinuated the whispers that he was a gambler, that he was a “drinking
man,” that he never went to church; and all the godly enjoyed mourning,
“Too bad to see a decent young man like that going to the dogs.”
Martin was as impatient as he was stubborn. He resented the well-meant
greetings: “You ought to leave a little hooch for the rest of us to
drink, Doc,” or “I s’pose you’re too busy playing poker to drive out to
the house and take a look at the woman.” He was guilty of an absurd and
boyish tactlessness when he heard Norblom observing to the postmaster,
“A fellow that calls himself a doctor just because he had luck with that
fool Agnes Ingleblad, he hadn’t ought to go getting drunk and
disgracing--”
Martin stopped. “Norblom! You talking about me?”
The storekeeper turned slowly. “I got more important things to do ’n
talk about you,” he cackled.
As Martin went on he heard laughter.
He told himself that these villagers were generous; that their snooping
was in part an affectionate interest, and inevitable in a village where
the most absorbing event of the year was the United Brethren Sunday
School picnic on Fourth of July. But he could not rid himself of twitchy
discomfort at their unending and maddeningly detailed comments on
everything. He felt as though the lightest word he said in his
consultation-room would be megaphoned from flapping ear to ear all down
the country roads.
He was contented enough in gossiping about fishing with the barber, nor
was he condescending to meteorologicomania, but except for Leora he had
no one with whom he could talk of his work. Angus Duer had been cold,
but Angus had his teeth into every change of surgical technique, and he
was an acrid debater. Martin saw that, unless he struggled, not only
would he harden into timid morality under the pressure of the village,
but be fixed in a routine of prescriptions and bandaging.
He might find a stimulant in Dr. Hesselink of Groningen.
He had seen Hesselink only once, but everywhere he heard of him as the
most honest practitioner in the Valley. On impulse Martin drove down to
call on him.
Dr. Hesselink was a man of forty, ruddy, tall, broad-shouldered. You
knew immediately that he was careful and that he was afraid of nothing,
however much he might lack in imagination. He received Martin with no
vast ebullience, and his stare said, “Well, what do you want? I’m a busy
man.”
“Doctor,” Martin chattered, “do you find it hard to keep up with medical
developments?”
“No. Read the medical journals.”
“Well, don’t you--gosh, I don’t want to get sentimental about it, but
don’t you find that without contact with the Big Guns you get mentally
lazy--sort of lacking in inspiration?”
“I do not! There’s enough inspiration for me in trying to help the
sick.”
To himself Martin was protesting, “All right, if you don’t want to be
friendly, go to the devil!” But he tried again:
“I know. But for the game of the thing, for the pleasure of increasing
medical knowledge, how can you keep up if you don’t have anything but
routine practise among a lot of farmers?”
“Arrowsmith, I may do you an injustice, but there’s a lot of you young
practitioners who feel superior to the farmers, that are doing their own
jobs better than you are. You think that if you were only in the city
with libraries and medical meetings and everything, you’d develop.
Well, I don’t know of anything to prevent your studying at home! You
consider yourself so much better educated than these rustics, but I
notice you say ‘gosh’ and ‘Big Guns’ and that sort of thing. How much do
you read? Personally, I’m extremely well satisfied. My people pay me an
excellent living wage, they appreciate my work, and they honor me by
election to the schoolboard. I find that a good many of these farmers
think a lot harder and squarer than the swells I meet in the city. Well!
I don’t see any reason for feeling superior, or lonely either!”
“Hell, I don’t!” Martin mumbled. As he drove back he raged at
Hesselink’s superiority about not feeling superior, but he stumbled into
uncomfortable meditation. It was true; he was half-educated. He was
supposed to be a college graduate but he knew nothing of economics,
nothing of history, nothing of music or painting. Except in hasty
bolting for examinations he had read no poetry save that of Robert
Service, and the only prose besides medical journalism at which he
looked nowadays was the baseball and murder news in the Minneapolis
papers and Wild West stories in the magazines.
He reviewed the “intelligent conversation” which, in the desert of
Wheatsylvania, he believed himself to have conducted at Mohalis. He
remembered that to Clif Clawson it had been pretentious to use any
phrase which was not as colloquial and as smutty as the speech of a
truck-driver, and that his own discourse had differed from Clif’s
largely in that it had been less fantastic and less original. He could
recall nothing save the philosophy of Max Gottlieb, occasional scoldings
of Angus Duer, one out of ten among Madeline Fox’s digressions, and the
councils of Dad Silva which was above the level of Alec Ingleblad’s
barber-shop.
He came home hating Hesselink but by no means loving himself; he fell
upon Leora and, to her placid agreement, announced that they were “going
to get educated, if it kills us.” He went at it as he had gone at
bacteriology.
He read European history aloud at Leora, who looked interested or at
least forgiving; he worried the sentences in a copy of “The Golden Bowl”
which an unfortunate school-teacher had left at the Tozers’; he borrowed
a volume of Conrad from the village editor and afterward, as he drove
the prairie roads, he was marching into jungle villages--sun helmets,
orchids, lost temples of obscene and dog-faced deities, secret and
sun-scarred rivers. He was conscious of his own mean vocabulary. It
cannot be said that he became immediately and conspicuously articulate,
yet it is possible that in those long intense evenings of reading with
Leora he advanced a step or two toward the tragic enchantments of Max
Gottlieb’s world--enchanting sometimes and tragic always.
But in becoming a schoolboy again he was not so satisfied as Dr.
Hesselink.
IV
Gustaf Sondelius was back in America.
In medical school, Martin had read of Sondelius, the soldier of science.
He held reasonable and lengthy degrees, but he was a rich man and
eccentric, and neither toiled in laboratories nor had a decent office
and a home and a lacy wife. He roamed the world fighting epidemics and
founding institutions and making inconvenient speeches and trying new
drinks. He was a Swede by birth, a German by education, a little of
everything by speech, and his clubs were in London, Paris, Washington,
and New York. He had been heard of from Batoum and Fuchau, from Milan
and Bechuanaland, from Antofagasta and Cape Romanzoff. Manson on
Tropical Diseases mentions Sondelius’s admirable method of killing rats
with hydrocyanic acid gas, and _The Sketch_ once mentioned his atrocious
system in baccarat.
Gustaf Sondelius shouted, in high places and low, that most diseases
could be and must be wiped out; that tuberculosis, cancer, typhoid, the
plague, influenza, were an invading army against which the world must
mobilize--literally; that public health authorities must supersede
generals and oil kings. He was lecturing through America, and his
exclamatory assertions were syndicated in the press.
Martin sniffed at most newspaper articles touching on science or health
but Sondelius’s violence caught him, and suddenly he was converted, and
it was an important thing for him, that conversion.
He told himself that however much he might relieve the sick, essentially
he was a business man, in rivalry with Dr. Winter of Leopolis and Dr.
Hesselink of Groningen; that though they might be honest, honesty and
healing were less their purpose than making money; that to get rid of
avoidable disease and produce a healthy population would be the worst
thing in the world for them; and that they must all be replaced by
public health officials.
Like all ardent agnostics, Martin was a religious man. Since the death
of his Gottlieb-cult he had unconsciously sought a new passion, and he
found it now in Gustaf Sondelius’s war on disease. Immediately he became
as annoying to his patients as he had once been to Digamma Pi.
He informed the farmers at Delft that they had no right to have so much
tuberculosis.
This was infuriating, because none of their rights as American citizens
was better established, or more often used, than the privilege of being
ill. They fumed, “Who does he think he is? We call him in for doctoring,
not for bossing. Why, the damn’ fool said we ought to burn down our
houses--said we were committing a crime if we had the con. here! Won’t
stand for nobody talking to me like that!”
Everything became clear to Martin--too clear. The nation must make the
best physicians autocratic officials, at once, and that was all there
was to it. As to how the officials were to become perfect executives,
and how people were to be persuaded to obey them, he had no suggestions
but only a beautiful faith. At breakfast he scolded, “Another idiotic
day of writing prescriptions for bellyaches that ought never to have
happened! If I could only get into the Big Fight, along with men like
Sondelius! It makes me tired!”
Leora murmured, “Yes, darling. I’ll promise to be good. I won’t have any
little bellyaches or T. B. or anything, so please don’t lecture me!”
Even in his irritability he was gentle, for Leora was with child.
V
Their baby was coming in five months. Martin promised to it everything
he had missed.
“He’s going to have a real education!” he gloated, as they sat on the
porch in spring twilight. “He’ll learn all this literature and stuff. We
haven’t done much ourselves--here we are, stuck in this two-by-twice
crossroads for the rest of our lives--but maybe we’ve gone a little
beyond our dads, and he’ll go way beyond us.”
He was worried, for all his flamboyance. Leora had undue morning
sickness. Till noon she dragged about the house, pea-green and tousled
and hollow-faced. He found a sort of maid, and came home to help, to
wipe the dishes and sweep the front walk. All evening he read to her,
not history now and Henry James but “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch,”
which both of them esteemed a very fine tale. He sat on the floor by the
grubby second-hand couch on which she lay in her weakness; he held her
hand and crowed:
“Golly, we-- No, not ‘golly’. Well, what _can_ you say except ‘golly’?
Anyway: Someday we’ll save up enough money for a couple months in Italy
and all those places. All those old narrow streets and old castles!
There must be scads of ’em that are couple hundred years old or older!
And we’ll take the boy.... Even if he turns out to be a girl, darn
him!... And he’ll learn to chatter Wop and French and everything like a
regular native, and his dad and mother’ll be so proud! Oh, we’ll be a
fierce pair of old birds! We never did have any more morals ’n a rabbit,
either of us, and probably when we’re seventy we’ll sit out on the
doorstep and smoke pipes and snicker at all the respectable people going
by, and tell each other scandalous stories about ’em till they want to
take a shot at us, and our boy--he’ll wear a plug hat and have a
chauffeur--he won’t dare to recognize us!”
Trained now to the false cheerfulness of the doctor, he shouted, when
she was racked and ghastly with the indignity of morning sickness,
“There, that’s fine, old girl! Wouldn’t be making a good baby if you
weren’t sick. Everybody is.” He was lying, and he was nervous. Whenever
he thought of her dying, he seemed to die with her. Barren of her
companionship, there would be nothing he wanted to do, nowhere to go.
What would be the worth of having all the world if he could not show it
to her, if she was not there--
He denounced Nature for her way of tricking human beings, by every gay
device of moonlight and white limbs and reaching loneliness, into having
babies, then making birth as cruel and clumsy and wasteful as she could.
He was abrupt and jerky with patients who called him into the country.
With their suffering he was sympathetic as he had never been, for his
eyes had opened to the terrible beauty of pain, but he must not go far
from Leora’s need.
Her morning sickness turned into pernicious vomiting. Suddenly, while
she was torn and inhuman with agony, he sent for Dr. Hesselink, and that
horrible afternoon when the prairie spring was exuberant outside the
windows of the poor iodoform-reeking room, they took the baby from her,
dead.
Had it been possible, he might have understood Hesselink’s success then,
have noted that gravity and charm, that pity and sureness, which made
people entrust their lives to him. Not cold and blaming was Hesselink
now, but an older and wiser brother, very compassionate. Martin saw
nothing. He was not a physician. He was a terrified boy, less useful to
Hesselink than the dullest nurse.
When he was certain that Leora would recover, Martin sat by her bed,
coaxing, “We’ll just have to make up our minds we never can have a baby
now, and so I want-- Oh, I’m no good! And I’ve got a rotten temper. But
to you, I want to be everything!”
She whispered, scarce to be heard:
“He would have been such a sweet baby. Oh, I know! I saw him so often.
Because I knew he was going to be like you, when you were a baby.” She
tried to laugh. “Perhaps I wanted him because I could boss him. I’ve
never had anybody that would let me boss him. So if I can’t have a real
baby, I’ll have to bring you up. Make you a great man that everybody
will wonder at, like your Sondelius.... Darling, I worried so about your
worrying--”
He kissed her, and for hours they sat together, unspeaking, eternally
understanding, in the prairie twilight.