I
Dr. Woestijne of Vanderheide’s Grove acted in spare time as
Superintendent of Health for Crynssen County, but the office was not
well paid and it did not greatly interest him. When Martin burst in and
offered to do all the work for half the pay, Woestijne accepted with
benevolence, assuring him that it would have a great effect on his
private practise.
It did. It almost ruined his private practise.
There was never an official appointment. Martin signed Woestijne’s name
(spelling it in various interesting ways, depending on how he felt) to
papers, and the Board of County Commissioners recognized Martin’s
limited power, but the whole thing was probably illegal.
There was small science and considerably less heroism in his first
furies as a health officer, but a great deal of irritation for his
fellow-townsmen. He poked into yards, he denounced Mrs. Beeson for her
reeking ash-barrels, Mr. Norblom for piling manure on the street, and
the schoolboard for the school ventilation and lack of instruction in
tooth-brushing. The citizens had formerly been agitated by his
irreligion, his moral looseness, and his lack of local patriotism, but
when they were prodded out of their comfortable and probably beneficial
dirt, they exploded.
Martin was honest and appallingly earnest, but if he had the innocence
of the dove he lacked the wisdom of the serpent. He did not make them
understand his mission; he scarce tried to make them understand. His
authority, as Woestijne’s _alter ego_, was imposing on paper but feeble
in action, and it was worthless against the stubbornness which he
aroused.
He advanced from garbage-spying to a drama of infection.
The community at Delft had a typhoid epidemic which slackened and
continually reappeared. The villagers believed that it came from a tribe
of squatters six miles up the creek, and they considered lynching the
offenders, as a practical protest and an interesting break in
wheat-farming. When Martin insisted that in six miles the creek would
purify any waste and that the squatters were probably not the cause, he
was amply denounced.
“He’s a fine one, he is, to go around blatting that we’d ought to have
more health precautions! Here we go and show him where there’s some
hellhounds that ought to be shot, and them only Bohunks anyway, and he
doesn’t do a darn’ thing but shoot a lot of hot air about germicidal
effect or whatever the fool thing is,” remarked Kaes, the wheat-buyer at
the Delft elevator.
Flashing through the county, not neglecting but certainly not enlarging
his own practise, Martin mapped every recent case of typhoid within five
miles of Delft. He looked into milk-routes and grocery deliveries. He
discovered that most of the cases had appeared after the visits of an
itinerant seamstress, a spinster virtuous and almost painfully hygienic.
She had had typhoid four years before.
“She’s a chronic carrier of the bugs. She’s got to be examined,” he
announced.
He found her sewing at the house of an old farmer-preacher.
With modest indignation she refused to be examined, and as he went away
she could be heard weeping at the insult, while the preacher cursed him
from the doorstep. He returned with the township police officer and had
the seamstress arrested and confined in the segregation ward of the
county poor-farm. In her discharges he found billions of typhoid
bacilli.
The frail and decent body was not comfortable in the board-lined
whitewashed ward. She was shamed and frightened. She had always been
well beloved, a gentle, shabby, bright-eyed spinster who brought
presents to the babies, helped the overworked farmwives to cook dinner,
and sang to the children in her thin sparrow voice. Martin was reviled
for persecuting her. “He wouldn’t dare pick on her if she wasn’t so
poor,” they said, and they talked of a jail-delivery.
Martin fretted. He called upon the seamstress at the poor-farm, he tried
to make her understand that there was no other place for her, he brought
her magazines and sweets. But he was firm. She could not go free. He was
convinced that she had caused at least one hundred cases of typhoid,
with nine deaths.
The county derided him. Cause typhoid now, when she had been well for
four years? The County Commissioners and the County Board of Health
called Dr. Hesselink in from the next county. He agreed with Martin and
his maps. Every meeting of the Commissioners was a battle now, and it
was uncertain whether Martin would be ruined or throned.
Leora saved him, and the seamstress. “Why not take up a collection to
send her off to some big hospital where she can be treated, or where
they can keep her if she can’t be cured?” said she.
The seamstress entered a sanitarium--and was amiably forgotten by
everybody for the rest of her life--and his recent enemies said of
Martin, “He’s mighty smart, and right on the job.” Hesselink drove over
to inform him, “You did pretty well this time, Arrowsmith. Glad to see
you’re settling down to business.”
Martin was slightly cocky, and immediately bounded after a fine new
epidemic. He was so fortunate as to have a case of small-pox and several
which he suspected. Some of these lay across the border in Mencken
County, Hesselink’s domain, and Hesselink laughed at him. “It’s probably
all chicken-pox, except your one case. Mighty rarely you get small-pox
in summer,” he chuckled, while Martin raged up and down the two
counties, proclaiming the scourge, imploring every one to be vaccinated,
thundering, “There’s going to be all hell let loose here in ten or
fifteen days!”
But the United Brethren parson, who served chapels in Wheatsylvania and
two other villages, was an anti-vaccinationist and he preached against
it. The villages sided with him. Martin went from house to house,
beseeching them, offering to treat them without charge. As he had never
taught them to love him and follow him as a leader, they questioned,
they argued long and easily on doorsteps, they cackled that he was
drunk. Though for weeks his strongest draft had been the acrid coffee of
the countryside, they peeped one to another that he was drunk every
night, that the United Brethren minister was about to expose him from
the pulpit.
And ten dreadful days went by and fifteen, and all but the first case
did prove to be chicken-pox. Hesselink gloated and the village roared
and Martin was the butt of the land.
He had only a little resented their gossip about his wickedness, only in
evenings of slow depression had he meditated upon fleeing from them,
but at their laughter he was black furious.
Leora comforted him with cool hands. “It’ll pass over,” she said. But it
did not pass.
By autumn it had become such a burlesque epic as peasants love through
all the world. He had, they mirthfully related, declared that anybody
who kept hogs would die of small-pox; he had been drunk for a week, and
diagnosed everything from gall-stones to heart-burn as small-pox. They
greeted him, with no meaning of offense in their snickering, “Got a
pimple on my chin, Doc. What is ’t--small-pox?”
More terrible than their rage is the people’s laughter, and if it rend
tyrants, with equal zest it pursues the saint and wise man and befouls
their treasure.
When the neighborhood suddenly achieved a real epidemic of diphtheria
and Martin shakily preached antitoxin, one-half of them remembered his
failure to save Mary Novak and the other half clamored, “Oh, give us a
rest! You got epidemics on the brain!” That a number of children quite
adequately died did not make them relinquish their comic epic.
Then it was that Martin came home to Leora and said quietly, “I’m
licked. I’ve got to get out. Nothing more I can do here. Take years
before they’d trust me again. They’re so damned _humorous_! I’m going to
go get a real job--public health.”
“I’m so glad! You’re too good for them here. We’ll find some big place
where they’ll appreciate your work.”
“No, that’s not fair. I’ve learned a little something. I’ve failed here.
I’ve antagonized too many people. I didn’t know how to handle them. We
could stick it out, and I would, except that life is short and I think
I’m a good worker in some ways. Been worrying about being a coward,
about running away, ‘turning my--’ What is it? ‘--turning my hand from
the plow.’ I don’t care now! By God, I know what I can do! Gottlieb saw
it! And I want to get to work. On we go. All right?”
“Of course!”
II
He had read in the _Journal of the American Medical Association_ that
Gustaf Sondelius was giving a series of lectures at Harvard. He wrote
asking whether he knew of a public health appointment. Sondelius
answered, in a profane and blotty scrawl, that he remembered with joy
their Minneapolis vacation, that he disagreed with Entwisle of Harvard
about the nature of metathrombin, that there was an excellent Italian
restaurant in Boston, and that he would inquire among his
health-official friends as to a position.
Two days later he wrote that Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh, Director of Public
Health in the city of Nautilus, Iowa, was looking for a
second-in-command, and would probably be willing to send particulars.
Leora and Martin swooped on an almanac.
“Gosh! Sixty-nine thousand people in Nautilus! Against three hundred and
sixty-six here--no, wait, it’s three hundred and sixty-seven now, with
that new baby of Pete Yeska’s that the dirty swine called in Hesselink
for. People! People that can talk! Theaters! Maybe concerts! Leora,
we’ll be like a pair of kids let loose from school!”
He telegraphed for details, to the enormous interest of the station
agent, who was also telegraph operator.
The mimeographed form which was sent to him said that Dr. Pickerbaugh
required an assistant who would be the only full-time medical officer
besides Pickerbaugh himself, as the clinic and school doctors were
private physicians working part-time. The assistant would be
epidemiologist, bacteriologist, and manager of the office clerks, the
nurses, and the lay inspectors of dairies and sanitation. The salary
would be twenty-five hundred dollars a year--against the fifteen or
sixteen hundred Martin was making in Wheatsylvania.
Proper recommendations were desired.
Martin wrote to Sondelius, to Dad Silva, and to Max Gottlieb, now at the
McGurk Institute in New York.
Dr. Pickerbaugh informed him, “I have received very pleasant letters
from Dean Silva and Dr. Sondelius about you, but the letter from Dr.
Gottlieb is quite remarkable. He says you have rare gifts as a
laboratory man. I take great pleasure in offering you the appointment
kindly wire.”
Not till then did Martin completely realize that he was leaving
Wheatsylvania--the tedium of Bert Tozer’s nagging--the spying of Pete
Yeska and the Norbloms--the inevitability of turning, as so many
unchanging times he had turned, south from the Leopolis road at the Two
Mile Grove and following again that weary, flat, unbending trail--the
superiority of Dr. Hesselink and the malice of Dr. Coughlin--the round
which left him no time for his dusty laboratory--leaving it all for the
achievement and splendor of the great city of Nautilus.
“Leora, we’re going! We’re really going!”
III
Bert Tozer said:
“You know by golly there’s folks that would call you a traitor, after
all we’ve done for you, even if you did pay back the thousand, to let
some other doc come in here and get all that influence away from the
Family.”
Ada Quist said:
“I guess if you ain’t any too popular with the folks around here you’ll
have one fine time in a big city like Nautilus! Well Bert and me are
going to get married next year and when you two swells make a failure of
it I suppose we’ll have to take care of you at our house when you come
sneaking back do you think we could get your house at the same rent you
paid for it oh Bert why couldn’t we take Mart’s office instead it would
save money well I’ve always said since we were in school together you
couldn’t stand a decent regular life Ory.”
Mr. Tozer said:
“I simply can’t understand it, with everything going so nice. Why, you’d
be making three-four thousand a year some day, if you just stuck to it.
Haven’t we tried to treat you nice? I don’t like to have my little girl
go away and leave me alone, now I’m getting on in years. And Bert gets
so cranky with me and Mother, but you and Ory would always kind of
listen to us. Can’t you fix it somehow so you could stay?”
Pete Yeska said:
“Doc, you could of knocked me down with a feather when I heard you were
going! Course you and me have scrapped about this drug business, but
Lord! I been kind of half thinking about coming around some time and
offering you a partnership and let you run the drug end to suit
yourself, and we could get the Buick agency, maybe, and work up a nice
little business. I’m real sorry you’re going to leave us.... Well, come
back some day and we’ll take a shot at the ducks, and have a good laugh
about that bull you made over the small-pox. I never will forget that! I
was saying to the old woman just the other day, when she had an
ear-ache, ‘Ain’t got small-pox, have yuh, Bess!’”
Dr. Hesselink said:
“Doctor, what’s this I hear? You’re not going away? Why, you and I were
just beginning to bring medical practise in this neck of the woods up to
where it ought to be, so I drove over to-night-- Huh? We panned you?
Ye-es, I suppose we did, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t appreciate you.
Small place like here or Groningen, you have to roast your neighbors to
keep busy. Why, Doctor, I’ve been watching you develop from an unlicked
cub to a real upstanding physician, and now you’re going away--you don’t
know how I feel!”
Henry Novak said:
“Why, Doc, you ain’t going to _leave_ us? And we got a new baby coming,
and I said to the woman, just the other day, ‘It’s a good thing we got a
doctor that hands you out the truth and not all this guff we used to get
from Doc Winter.’”
The wheat-buyer at Delft said:
“Doc, what’s this I hear? You ain’t going _away_? A fellow told me you
was and I says to him, ‘Don’t be more of a damn’ fool than the Lord
meant you to be,’ I says. But I got to worrying about it, and I drove
over and-- Doc, I fire off my mouth pretty easy, I guess. I was agin you
in the typhoid epidemic, when you said that seamstress was carrying the
sickness around, and then you showed me up good. Doc, if you’d like to
be state senator, and if you’ll stay-- I got quite a little
influence--believe me, I’ll get out and work my shirt off for you!”
Alec Ingleblad said:
“You’re a lucky guy!”
All the village was at the train when they left for Nautilus.
For a hundred autumn-blazing miles Martin mourned his neighbors. “I feel
like getting off and going back. Didn’t we used to have fun playing Five
Hundred with the Fraziers! I hate to think of the kind of doctor they
may get. I swear, if some quack settles there or if Woestijne neglects
the health work again, I’ll go back and run ’em both out of business!
And be kind of fun to be state senator, some ways.”
But as evening thickened and nothing in all the rushing world existed
save the yellow Pinsch gas globes above them in the long car, they saw
ahead of them great Nautilus, high honor and achievement, the making of
a radiant model city, and the praise of Sondelius--perhaps even of Max
Gottlieb.